Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

1 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Anything that uses XMP should work well. by jafo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform

    There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.

    My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").

    So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.

    But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.

    Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$UUID_STRING". It also saves off the "album thumbnail" in a similar way ("Blog/Group/IsAlbumThumbnail").

    It's worked extremely well.

    I use the command-line "exiv2" program to export and import the XMP data as XML, then I process it (the parts mentioned above) as XML.