A File-Centric Photo Manager?

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."

Comments

How Aperture can help, and where not

[SuperKendall]

Aperture (from Apple, runs only on Macs, sorry) is probably the best fit for what you want to do.

It has face recognition now, it allows you to batch assign locations, it has tag management in that it has the ability to define tag sets to quickly apply to photos, to edit a tag library for general tag entry, and do very fast searches across the whole library by tags or any other photo metadata.

What it does not do, is store those tags in the file itself since the deal with Aperture is that the underlying philosophy is, never modify the master image. However the reason it would work for you is because you can easily export to pretty much anywhere through Aperture - there are a ton of export presets (and you can modify any of those or create new ones), and an export API that gives you export workflows for things like Flickr and so on - any of these options can include any metadata, including custom tags you have defined.

It also handles videos now which is quite helpful, I'm not sure how exactly tags work with exporting those as I don't use that much yet.

Image organization and searching is I think Aperture's strong point over something like Lightroom - since you seem very focused on that problem I thought this might be a good fit. Both Aperture and Lightroom have free trials to see if you like how they flow.