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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."
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!
can't seem to find linux-version
He doesn't want a GPL Linux version because if he uses it, his photos become derivative works and therefore he loses all ownership of his photos, his camera, his computer, and everything that he photographed becomes GPL'd which means, if the guy photographed his girlfriend, all of the FOSS community has to sleep with her.
Mods, this is a fight between Trolls, go mod something worthwhile.
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.......
Seconded.
It's really a fascinating indicator of the situation Microsoft is in that they are so scared to include or promote basic photo gallery features in Win7 that people like this are completely unaware it exists.
For my money I like it much better than Picasa for the simple reason that it treats your photos *as files* rather than as a *database*. I got completely fed up with Picasa *pretending* it had modified my files when it had really only made changes in it's own database. Then you give photos to someone else and you find Picasa never really applied any of your changes. Or worse, you ditch Picasa and find out that years of long hard work is gone because Picasa was privately storing all that information (even things like rotations, cropping, etc.). (Yes, I know it has some option somewhere to turn this off. I resent the fact they make it the default).
You mean like how everything he films with his camera will become covered under the MPEG-LA patents and thus forbidden to share? Too bad I'm not trolling, like you. :(
c++;
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.
I think it's exellent that the app does not alter the *original files* as the default setting.
How many people do you really think want transformations like rotations only applied as metadata in some unknown database someplace? When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image. If she uses Windows' interface to print the photo or emails it to a friend, it is the rotated image she cares about.
Not only that, but if you are backing up your photos to an external source like a good user, imagine the frustration when years of transformations, edits, tags, etc are all lost when you recover from a failed hard drive using your backup. You did everything right, but because you didn't include some hidden little .dat file buried in your profile as part of the backup you lost hundreds of hours of work.
Modifications to the files should be applied to the files. Metadata should be stored in the files. To do either otherwise is asking for problems.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I actually agree with both methods. I don't want my files destructively altered by my photo cataloging software. I also don't want to lose my hours of work.
Having used Picasa extensively since it was purchased by Google, I have suffered the lost hard drive issue - losing all of my folders that had taken years to put together - with 50k+ photos, that's no joke. It was a royal pain in the ass. The picasa backup tool brought back all of the photos, and something of a database of folders and faces, but hopelessly corrupted so that I had thousands of "faces" in the wrong file or wrong location on the file, all labeled "unknown".
I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.
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.
>MPEG LA doesn't forbid sharing of anything.
Yes, it DOES.
If you have enough "subscribers" if you do not charge per download (over 100,000) you MUST PAY A LICENSE FEE. And these fees are much steeper than Over-The-Air video, because the Internet is somehow special.
If you make video LONGER THAN 12 MINUTES and distribute it you must pay 2% royalties *or* 2 cents per movie, whichever is greater. If your home movie becomes popular and is more than 12 minutes and you have not paid your two cents per download (even if you do not charge for it!) and they take notice of it, you will soon see the sky blacken with lawyers.
If your video is longer than 12 minutes, MPEG-LA has its hooks in your content whether you like it or not. Even if it's a home movie of your kids that is 13 minutes long, you owe MPEG-LA money if you "broadcast" it over the Internet. Even if you give it away, the minimum charge is 2 cents per download as described above.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/The-H.264-Licensing-Labyrinth-65403.aspx
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BMO
Doesn't matter. The file was encoded using their codecs when it was initially captured by your video camera. Unless you own one of the 3 models that use motion JPEG to capture, the licensing terms in the software encoder used by your hardware dictate that you pay them this royalty regardless of the codec you use to distribute.
Fun, huh?
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
Retail sale - disk or download:
where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis...royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12 minutes or less) are..the lower of 2% of the price paid to the
Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title
Subscription services:
Where an end user pays directly for video services on a subscription-basis (not ordered or limited title-by-title), the applicable royalties...payable by the service or content provider are...100,000 or fewer subscribers during the year = no royalty; greater than 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers during the year = $25,000; greater than 250,000 to 500,000 subscribers during the year = $50,000; greater than 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers during the year = $75,000; greater than 1,000,000 subscribers during the year =$100,000.
Sponsorship
Where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of free television [over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission]...which is not paid for by an End User), the licensee [the broadcaster] may pay...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder...or (ii) annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the end user does not pay..for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010) and following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The enterprise cap
In the case of the...sublicenses for video content or service providers, the maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year in 2010.
Renewable five-year license
License will be renewable for five-year periods...on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific
licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal
To sum up:
If you are worth less than $2500 to MPEG LA they don't want to hear from you.
[Retail sale of 125,000 Trek Wars disks @ 2 cents a disk]
Under the existing formula, the licensing cost to Apple, Disney, Microsoft or Google for hosting freely distributed H.264 video on the Internet would be capped at $5 million a year.
Chicken feed.
Well, thankfully some (quite a lot actually) of us live in "communist" countries, where such blatant attempts at blackmail will be laughed out of court.
Some of us even live in countries, where the lawyer representing the MPEG-LA is likely to have his or her knuckles used as target practice for the judge's gavel.
See - not only did we not sign any contract with the MPEG-LA, nor do software patents apply, but if we've bought a product in good faith, any patent breach that might apply is going to fall on the head of the manufacturer, i.e. the company that made the camera - not us. And since any camera that can record video is designed to ... what's the term ... record video, we will always be in good faith, even if we record more than 12 minutes and turn it into a movie.
But hey - if that means we can't publish or visit the US without getting sued in the US - well, that's their loss, not ours.
can't seem to find car-version
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Since when that allows a corporation to screw you over more effectively, the same as with all other Intellectual Property laws, and with all laws if we really think about it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.