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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."
It stores the information in the images, as it should, and it maintains a database for fast access. And it's free.
Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is pretty awesome. Has a free trial. Check it out.
Picasa by Google is pretty good, too. Free.
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.
portfolio
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fototagger/
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.
I've been searching for the same feature set, a file centric image manager whose metadata is stored exclusively in the file.
One of the best ones I have found is Mapivi:
http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml
I still often use Digikam, but its metadata support is inconsistent at best. On the other hand the front end is more useable than Mapivi.
You should also look at ExifTool, because you can manipulate and query metadata with it on the command line.
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
If you find a solution, please share!
OS X comes with a graphical scripting tool called Automator. You can set up a batch file rename script with it that will rename every photo in a folder of your choice with the date and time added to the file name, plus a sequence number, and any other text if you desire. I used it to rename over 8000 photos originally named img_xxxx in 2 or 3 minutes.
So just copy them onto a Mac, run the Automator script on them, and copy them back.
Picasa is best, however, AFAIK it doesn't store the info in the files...stores the face stuff in its own database. I learned this the hard way...
What you really need to do is this. Buy a couple plaid shirts, some black socks and some Birks but make sure you pay a lot for them. Get some capri pants at the GAP (make sure you pay full price). Next, get some patchouli scented shave lotion and a Mac(don't worry...you will pay full price for this and we have begun. Go home set up your make and get changed, you are now a Mac owner! You will find that tagging, sorting,arranging via meta data is easy. Its living that has become hard. Now you must tag everything using iambic pantameter and haiku. Instead of tagging things buy the current dating system use what day of the BP disaster it is. If your wife asks you what you are doing, try to be condescending... no one understands you anymore but steve. While tagging your photos try to use the words postmodern and neo a lot. it will begin to feel natural soon... Good luck! A new mac user| so fragile and delicate| like leaves on a breeze
sig loading.......
http://download.live.com/
Install Windows Live PhotoGallery from the Windows Live Essentials. This is exactly what it is designed for and can do smart tagging.
Even though Win7 doesn't install the 'Essentials' applications, they really are 'Essential' to get the most out of Windows7. There is also a download link for them in the Start Menu, and you can pick and choose what you want easily.
Doing all your tagging via Explorer is functional, but not the optimal way of dealing with Photos in Windows 7. In Photogallery you just drag and drop to tag photos or use the face identification system.
(The June beta of the next generation of Live Essentials and PhotoGallery should be along soon as well with several new tricks that pulls in several of the MS Photo R&D work.)
*Don't waste your time with 'Album' or other tagging software that shoves your photos into their file structure, which is a LOT of them.
Adobe Bridge sounds perfect.
Besides being one of the best photo managers I have worked with, you can directly edit the metadata for each file. The only downside is that it usually comes bundled with other Adobe software, which can be costly.
Yea, that seems like a significant draw-back.
So, what, I spend $700 for photoshop (and at least have something useful for my money), or buy InCopy for $250 and just install Bridge since InCopy is useless crap by itself?
There's got to be a better way of tagging photo files than dealing with Adobe, their crappy website, and their annoying phone-home DRM.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform
There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.
My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").
So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.
But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.
Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$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.
Oh, I forgot to mention that my initial photo load was 3400-ish photos. So, about half the size of the OPs set of photos.
I use ACDSee. I don't know how the cost compares to lightroom but I bet it's less.
I second that reocmmendation -- I have not found a better tool than lightroom. You'll have to remember to either select the auto-write option or remember to manually sync, and quite oddly it won't let you add geotags -- it'll read them and even gives you nifty Google maps links, but it won't let you edit them; everything else you can, and the sorting and tagging features are superb. Of course it's also a brilliant editor, and not too cheap, but it's one software package I, as an avid amateur photographer, felt was worth every penny.
IIUC the geotagging has been added in LR 3.
But for those of us still on LR 2 there is the [b]excellent[/b] plugin:
http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps
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.
He'll know much more quickly if there's a virus or backdoor, as someone in the community is likely to discover it first.
http://jbrout.python-hosting.com/wiki Cross platform. Claims to have been tested on GNU/Linux and Windows XP/2K. Been meaning to try it as my own photo collection is starting to get a little unwieldy, but haven't done so yet.
I can vouch for the robustness of DNG files. I lost a HDD, recovered most of the files, dumped them back into Lightroom and everything was retained, even my ratings and edit history. DNG is an awesome format.
On your own system you could simply take advantage of Long File Names to associate a modest amount of data with an image. If you really want the data inside the file, though, then almost any image-manipulation tool will let you do that. Take "good old Microsoft Paint" for example. You can take an image that is, say, 300x400 pixels and paste it into a completely blank image where you have specified a size of 300x500 pixels. Your original image now occupies the upper part of this new image, and you have 300x100 pixels, below that image, where you can draw stuff or use the Text tool to type stuff. Then simply save it.
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O'Reilly has a book on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. Check out his web site at: http://thedambook.com/ There are several forums there where you can ask your question.
can't seem to find car-version
I can do better than that! I'd like to present the transformers analogy - it's like a car analogy, but it changes into a robot analogy!
Let's say the GPL and MPEG LA are both kind of like jeeps - both are utilitarian enough to help you accomplish quite a lot, but they can be rather unwieldy, too. We could say that GPL is more like the old army jeep and its relatives - it gives you access to a lot of things but it comes with its own hindrances. But you have the opportunity to pick through what's out there, perhaps finding something useful and affordable, or at least salvageable. MPEG-LA is more like the XR311 or HMMWV - it gives you a lot more capability but with a correspondingly higher price.
Now, when they turn into robots - GPL is like a force for good. It's the result of a conscientious effort to change the world for the better. However, to accomplish its aims it has to use its leverage - some would say this is a sort of trickery, drawing people in to use GPL software and then snaring them with obligations. In robot terms this would be like projecting holograms to fool people into doing certain things.
MPEG-LA is, of course, much more profit-minded. Perhaps it's not really "evil" though some people might say it is - but it's generally serving its own ends. It's important to note that the MPEG-LA is really just one part of a larger system... To return to the robot analogy, it's as though the MPEG-LA were part of a team that could combine to form a bigger robot, with the MPEG-LA acting as an arm or a leg, while other intellectual property groups could form the other limbs and the torso. Together, they would form a massive digital media powerhouse.
Bow-ties are cool.
I found this workaround in the support forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=0fc1904e15cc777c&hl=en
1. in the upper right search box, search for jpg. (Presumably this will find all your photos)
2. In the upper left, under Albums, you should see a an album called 'Search results for "jpg"
3. Click the album name to enter the album. You should then be able to press the 'save' button to save all changes to disk.