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A File-Centric Photo Manager?

Posted by timothy on from the let-me-know-what-you-find dept.

JeremyDuffy writes "I have a photo project of over 7,000 photos. I want to tag them based on location, time of day, who's in them, etc. Doing this by hand one at a time through the Windows 7 interface in Explorer is practically madness. There has to be a better way. Is there a photo manager that can easily group and manage file tags? And most importantly, something that stores the tag and other data (description etc.) in the file, not just a database? I don't care if the thing has a database, but the data must be in the file so when I upload the files to the Internet, the tags are in place."

4 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Google Picassa by Bizzeh · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google Picassa is actually quite good at everything you asked for, and, it has face recognition, so once you tag one face, it generally recognises most of the images of the same person for you.

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    portfolio
  2. fototagger by epedersen · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/fototagger/

  3. Re:Adobe bridge? by woolpert · · Score: 5, Informative

    Lightroom is likely more than you need, but Lightroom does this.
    I convert my various (nef, cr2) raw files to DNG upon importation to my library, and save metadata to the files themselves, not XML sidecar files.

    While Adobe Lightroom will want work with its own database, by always syncing metadata to file you will have a 100% portable set of images.

  4. Re:IPTC, Picasa & Lightroom by namalc · · Score: 5, Informative

    Picasa doesn't store its tagging info locally in each directory; this information is put in the "Program Files"

    I'm often surprised by how few people understand how Picasa really works, as this is not the case.

    Any potentially 'destructive' changes to a photo are stored in a picasa.ini file in each folder. These changes include rotations, cropping, sharpen, etc. When you view a photo in picasa, it displays with all these changes applied. You can undo a change at any time. Changes are NOT applied to the file on disk until you press 'save'.
    To be clear, there is no magic, hidden, or proprietary database; it's just a simple per-directory picasa.ini file. As for backups, if you've backed up the directory including the picasa.ini file, then any non-saved changes will be backed up.

    Non-destructive changes, such as captions or tags, are applied immediately to the photo. Again, to be clear, these are applied directly to the photo and can be read by any other photo tool that can read exif data.

    The one exception to this is the recently introduced face tagging feature. Unfortunately, Google really messed up with their implementation of this feature. Facial tags are stored in a combination of the picasa.ini file & a central database. I've found the implementation to be quite poor, and I would not recommend using this feature.