Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Image Organization?

Wycliffe writes Like many people, I am starting to get a huge collection of digital photos from family vacations, etc. I am looking for some software that allows me to rate/tag my own photos in a quick way. I really don't want to spend the time tagging a bunch of photos and then be locked into a single piece of software, so what is the best software to help organize and tag photos so that I can quickly find highlights without being locked into that software for life? I would prefer open source to prevent lock-in and also prefer Linux but could do Windows if necessary.

Comments

WAMP/LAMP

[ihtoit]

or just get to tagging each file individually.

"family vacations"

[Anonymous Coward]

Like many people, I am starting to get a huge collection of digital photos from family vacations, etc.

"family vacations". Yeah right.

Re: "family vacations"

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant parents

Simplest is best

[amightywind]

mkdir, find.

Re:Simplest is best

[Wycliffe]

Not sure why this is modded down. This was actually my first idea. The problem with this
is that it effectively only allows one "tag" i.e. /2004/vacation/good/ /2004/vacation/bad/
The only way to have multiple categories would be with a bunch of symbolic links which
might not be too bad if there was a simple program to handle it. The other idea would be
to actually store the meta data inside of each photo. That way the meta data shouldn't
be lost if I'm forced to move to a different program assuming the new program can read
the metadata.

Re:Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this vote for using the file system to organise your images. This post may give me away to some of my friends, but I create folders using this template:

[YYYY-MM-DD] Descriptive Name of Trip or Event

This allows me to have multiple groups of images on a given day, say a lunchtime function and a dinner party.

For groups that span multiple days I do this:

[YYYY-MM-XX] Descriptive Name of Multi-Day Event

If I go on a big trip then what I do is create sub folders with the date (using the same format) for each event or grouping or experience that I captured.

If I have a folder of photos and want to make a small sub-selection. I make a folder called "pick" and put them in there. I may also do a low-res copy of that folder (and call it "web pick") and then I can email them easily to friends. I don't bother with links or any other garbage, 50-500MB of duplication doesn't matter a damn, and the backup software has de-duplication so doesn't care either.

Finally, I've done this for almost 15 years and it's basically worked perfectly for me and I have a fantastic collection of photos going all the way back.

Sorry, this the actual finally. Be very wary of *any* automated system based on a database or tagging system. The problem is that while initially they may seem awesome and great time savers, you will ultimately want to group [at least some of] the photos based on social, aesthetic and political assessments, and no automatic system can ever handle that.

Re: Simplest is best

[RJFerret]

This. Structure based on how you tend to look for things. For example, I put trip photos in their own folder as I associate them with a trip. Photos that fit a subject go in an appropriate main folder. I'm an ISTx MBTI type so name things literally which also helps search. Not only do I have pics dating back to the 80s but also was a professional video editor starting with one of the first broadcast quality non-linear editing systems, meaning being able to find a visual by name from scrolling, as no search. So I give everything a descriptive name and iterate based on revisions, a habit from my image editing days. This makes easy to find what you are looking for in specific resolutions or treatments.

Re:Simplest is best

[dotancohen]

mkdir, find.

If you are going that route, then you should know as well:
img2txt: Show a small image in colour in a text console.
asciiview: Show the image in fullscreen b/w in a text console.

Yes, those commands work in a text console.

Re:Simplest is best

[twitnutttt]

I have maintained basically this exact same system for all my photos since 2000. It's easy since photo loading software will automatically organize by date for you, and then you just add the event description to the folder name. The only failing is when I am too lazy to add the event description and just end up with a lot of folders that are only dates. Sometimes, I will add a little description (AKA tag) to individual image files that are of particular noteworthiness to me. (E.g., pictures that are suitable as "profile" pics).

Re: Simplest is best

[twitnutttt]

Organize into folders chronologically first! Add other keywords to the folder names and you can search on those to dynamically extract groups. But trying to pre-group in advance will cause you nothing but headaches... Picture on a trip with grandma in Hawaii. Does this go in "trips" or "grandma"? No, it goes in: "2013-03-04 trip to hawaii with grandma".

Re:Simplest is best

[tsa]

This. I have a few categories like animals, landscapes and the like where the date I have taken the pictures doesn't matter so much but most of my pictures are in [path]/happenings/[date][description]. All file names in that directory also start with the date and a description, followed by a number to keep them in a logical order.

Re:Simplest is best

[MikeBabcock]

That worked for me until I started uploading photos to Flickr and realized how powerful tags are for searching and organizing. I'd much rather have something equivalent for my local filesystem.

Re:Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

Extended Attributes for files in the filesystem maybe?

Re:Simplest is best

[Smurf]

I guess it's not your system of choice (nor the submitter's), but OS X does have a very useful tagging feature on the filesystem.

Furthermore, there are many applications, such as the ones made by Ironic Software, that allow you to search, organize, and work with your files in very powerful ways using those tags. Since the tagging system is common to all of them you are not tied to any particular application (although you do become dependent on OS X at least until other systems implement tagging).

Re: Simplest is best

[RJFerret]

In my case that would be trips/Hawaii_grandma-2013-03-04 as I wouldn't have a clue when. Most OS folder sorts help there though, some more than others.

Re:Simplest is best

[Immerman]

With a good filename indexing system (I use the freeware "Everything" on Windows, still looking for a comparable Linux equivalent) you don't even necessarily need categories - if you're willing to add tags to the end of the file names:
      Myphotot1234___beach moon party.jpg
Fire up Everything and type in "par oon", and the list of *every* file on your computer containing those character sequences is already displayed, add "bea" and you're probably down to few enough files that you can spot the one you want.

Folders can then be used to create "albums", or whatever other complementary organization scheme you want, for when you're not looking for a specific file. And of course folder names can be similarly tagged, Everything catches them too.

Please, if anyone knows of something similar for Linux, let me know. I cant overstate how much of a difference a winnowed-as-you-type list makes for me. Even instant search times after you hit the button don't compare.

Re:Simplest is best

[dargaud]

Exactly. Using the filesystem is the best and simplest method. I have images ranging 150 years and 10 Tb using this method and I can find things in a few seconds, either with the find command or by zeroing on the date. Fo old scans that aren't dated precisely you can simply use 'YYYY-event" or 'YYYYMM-event'. And it works on any OS and any media (CD, HD...) so you KNOW it'll still work when your granchildren will want to sift through your images.

Re:Simplest is best

[kaur]

I use the
2014 / summer / 2014-vacation-good
2014 / summer / 2014-vacation-bad
structure, and after a delay, I delete all "bad" directories.

It all depends on how many pictures you take or how many "events" or sessions you have, and how much work you do afterwards. If you shoot 100 sessions per month and expect those to searchable by person, location, .. - file system won't do. For a casual family photographer like me, it works very well.

A question to answer is:
WHY do you have a HUGE selection of vacation photos? Nobody, ever, will want to look at those. I think a a few tens of photos, possibly a hundred, are maximum that you need to bring back the memories. For friends & relatives, ever less will do.

Re: Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

On Linux, KDE has the same thing, and it now works wonderfully as of around version 4.10.

Re:Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

That's useless. How do you find the images containing blue cars, your kid doing X, granny asleep? This is why people use tags, it allows finding what you want when you want.

Re:Simplest is best

[Wycliffe]

Please, if anyone knows of something similar for Linux, let me know. I cant overstate how much of a difference a winnowed-as-you-type list makes for me. Even instant search times after you hit the button don't compare.

This might be what you're looking for:
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01...

Re:Simplest is best

[Wycliffe]

WHY do you have a HUGE selection of vacation photos? Nobody, ever, will want to look at those. I think a a few tens of photos, possibly a hundred, are maximum that you need to bring back the memories. For friends & relatives, ever less will do.

I agree completely. That's why I was curious about how to manage them. Storage is cheap enough that having a few gigs of family photos isn't a big deal, but as far as looking at them, a half dozen per year is probably more than enough. I could delete all but a half dozen per year but that's a bit too aggressive for my taste so rating them so that I can look at the "top 50 all times" or the "top 25 for 2014" seems like the better idea.

Re:Simplest is best

[Immerman]

Thank you, that is close enough to at least get the job done in a pinch. It's *sooo* slow though, and doesn't even include an indicator to tell you whether it's still working or it just can't find what I'm looking for. Can anyone know suggest something that uses indexing instead of a file system search?

Example of the functionality that I so love in Everything:
As soon as I open it I see a list of all 100,000 files on my computer (well, it may take several seconds to update the index first if it hasn't been run in a while). Then as fast as I type the file count shrinks as non-matching files are removed from the list. No perceivable lag whatsoever as the list shrinks from hundreds of thousands of entries to a handful, nor as it grows back if I hit backspace a few times. I know instantly if I mis-typed something as the list goes empty, and no waiting around to see if maybe the file is just buried 20 folders down and needs a while to be located.

I'm aware that Everything exploits the implementation details of the NTFS file system to perform it's lightning-quick indexing, and would be willing to let a well-behaved indexing daemon loose on my system to get the same functionality, but I've yet to find anything that even offers a well-behaved daemon, much less that wonderful winnowed-list. Tried KDE 4.X for a while earlier this year and hoped their built-in indexing would do the job - but it would often start randomly hogging 60+% of the CPU in the background, and still sometimes fail to find files altogether. Plus I didn't much care for the rest of the desktop: promising, and much improved from the early 4.X days, but still not quite ready for prime time in my book.

Re:Simplest is best

[quetwo]

With the cost of spinning discs so cheap, why delete any of them (aside from the obviously bad blurry ones)? I've always had a habit of tagging photos as good or bad (in the metadata of the photos, using Lightroom), with the thought of deleting them one day if I needed space. Then my grandmother passed away and a whole bunch of photos that were deemed "meh," became much more valuable. For the cost of pennies to store them and keep them around I was able to create a photo album of passable photos that meant the world to my parents and extended family.

Worst come to worst, move them to slow storage (DVD's Bluerays, etc), if you don't want to keep them on spinning discs.

Re:Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have 'good' and 'bad' COPIES of the same file, if you insist, for discovery. You can also leave the filenames exactly as (uniquely) named by the camera, and add a tag when editing, e.g. "-m" for any modified copy, or even in full "-modified" (e.g. "DSC01234567-selected-for-printing.jpg").

fdupes and find will do most useful tasks, especially if the images are arranged in useful folder structures, e.g. "2011-09-21 My party at the zoo", so find -iname "*printing.jpg" would list anything for printing.

Re: Simplest is best

[Smurf]

That is fantastic! Thank you very much for the info!

For others that may be interested in file tagging in Linux, it seems there are two systems: the old one called Nepomuk and its replacement Baloo.

Nepomuk uses a database that needs to be running permanently which associates tags and files. That approach has too many drawbacks, and quite frankly would be an unsatisfactory substitute for OS X's tagging.

Baloo, on the other hand, does things the right way, by incorporating the tags into an extended attribute for the file. That is exactly the way it's done in OS X, and it works awesomely provided that you have a good indexing system that indexes those extended attributes like Spotlight does. (Close-to-immediate searches are fundamental for the success of a system-wide tagging system.)

Thanks again for the info!

Re:Simplest is best

[azav]

Even though the new Mac OS systems are pretty ugly UI wise, you can add tags to each file. This might be what you want.

If not, you can have a program that simply creates a hierarchy of each of your files within a folder and gives a unique ID to each file and folder within your top level.

Make a checksum on each file and apply that to the record for each file.

You can then find the file or folder again if you move it from one folder to another.

You can then create tags and apply them to the record for each file.

Also, since you have added checksums for each file, you can rebuild your library if you mistakenly move, delete or undelete a file since running a checksum on each file will create the same checksum. This will allow you to scan all the file records and map any lost record to the proper lost file. Also, as a set of backups, you can simply export this list of file references, checksums and tags.

If you have a bunch of tags, then you can search through all folders for all like tags.

So, you can use the Mac OS and add tags too your files, or you can put something like this together and use on other OSes that don't allow you to add tags to your individual files.

Re:Simplest is best

[GLMDesigns]

I do much the same thing. Take a bunch of pictures and call it 2014-Christmas or 2014-10-Trip-to-NH and leave it at that. But I, as with the OP, would like to be able to search all the photos for people as opposed to remembering where and when I saw them.

Good tool for Exif and IPTC

[Anonymous Coward]

Camera Bits Photo Mechanic has been a good fast tool for tagging and sorting images. It seem it is the industry standard among news agencies.

Re:Good tool for Exif and IPTC

[tezbobobo]

It has the benefit of reading embedded Jpegs from RAW files to make it MUCH faster than things like lightroom.

Paint Shop Pro 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Never moved on from its browser!!!!

lightroom darktable

[blackest_k]

my first thought was lightroom but darktable is free runs on linux( OSX too) and will also generate a database of your images.

For image processing you would also want a 1GB or better graphics card to take advantage of GPU processing, not that you are really interested in that, other people maybe.

Re:lightroom darktable

[amplesand]

I was intrigued by your description and made an "aptitude search darktable" on my Debian system. It sure sounds like a nice piece of software I could have used for my gazillion photos.

To my utter surprise, the software "darktable" was already installed, and, I had apparently tagged two images the late summer 2013. I had no recollection of that... But, an "aptitude search sparetime" gave me the answer. I didn't have that.

The software may well be excellent, but, make sure you have both, the software and the spare time.

Re:lightroom darktable

[blackest_k]

To be fair there is a learning curve that can rival photoshop or lightroom however there is a pretty comprehensive manual to walk you through the features.
However you will need to invest a little time to get the most out of it.

Re:lightroom darktable

[pokoteng]

This is the correct answer. Professional photographers use Lightroom / darktable for organising hundreds of photos taken every shoot, and for good reason, because that's exactly what it's made for. You'll have to give up the condition of "being locked into a software" though, especially if you go with Lightroom.

You just flag/rate the images, and once you're done just filter it, select all, right click export or whatever you want set up. Organised by date, add comments, even do quite a bit of touch up to improve the photos quickly (increase exposure, get white balance right).

Re:lightroom darktable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit sad that RawTherapee doesn't get as much attention. It has functionality that rivals Lightroom but unlike Lightroom (and Darktable), RawTherapee runs on all of the big three - Windows, Linux and OS X.

Re:lightroom darktable

[rnswebx]

Interested, I had a look at their website and got a little laugh out of what they had to say about a Windows build:

Microsoft Windows

Unfortunately the community of this commercial distro didn't natively build dt yet.
But there's a better solution for you to try:
Download and burn a live ISO of a Linux distribution.
Reboot your machine.

Re:lightroom darktable

[ssam]

RawTherapee is great for editing the raw files, but I wish it had a better browser to photos. My perfect software would probably have shotwell as the browser/tagger and RawTherapee as the editor.

Google Picasa 3

[sundru]

Google Picasa 3 , I find this has a little bit of everything i need except duplicate file management.

Re: Google Picasa 3

[blahbooboo]

Spot on. Picasa is fantastic.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Pikoro]

Under the Tools menu, there is an Experimental sub-menu. Select "Show duplicate files". Then I just deleted everything that shows up. Seems to work just fine. It's not automatic or anything, but it works.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Harlequin80]

+1 for Picasa. I like that it is cross platform. Only draw back for me is there is no easy way to share its database. If you could have the database synced across multiple machines it would be an instant win.

I also use pixfer to transfer the files from the memory cards to the pc. Its abandonware now and released free of charge but it reads the exif data from the files and renames them to suit. So my files are always placed in a director of the date the photo was taken and then the file is also renamed with the date. So I end up with /yyyy-mm-dd/yyyy-mm-dd-img###.jpg

I then append a description to the directory and the file.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Anonymous Coward]

"no easy way to share its database"

there's the lock-in tfs wanted to avoid... plus google has a long history of shuttering projects and products that do not generate enough revenue for them... and that could easily happen to this standalone application in favor of a web-only product.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Harlequin80]

It's easy to transfer to a new machine. The problem is being able to access it from multiple machines at once. ie My machine and my wife's machine can't access the database together.

As for lock-in - it is a stand alone application with no activation or licensing requirements. It works on windows, mac & linux. JPEG is the standard and unlikely to change. Tags in picassa can be saved to the exif data so there is no lockin there. The lockin comes in that picasa does face recognition which for me is THE killer part of picasa. Find me all the photos with x in it is brilliant.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[famebait]

My only quibble with Picasa is that it the Mac version doesn't have proper retina support yet (which you REALLY want in a photo app). I'm sure it will be fixed eventually.

But otherwise Picasa is fantastic. Very good at using the actual files and filesystem rather than a proprietary database.

Whatever you chose, make sure it encodes metadata IN the actual file or filename, so you can shove a subset to whatever other app or platform you like and it will tag along with no process required. Given the choice, in-file is better than filname, so that sync tools can match up different revisions of the same image.

Re: Google Picasa 3

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Picasa, but seems like every time I copy the pictures, like for a fresh install of the OS, or to a new computer, I loose all the metadata.

Am I doing it wrong?

If the ALL if the data were stored in the folders, it would be a lot easier to keep it. It seems to link people, but not know their names, for example.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[carnivore302]

+1 for Picasa. I like that it is cross platform.

"Picasa is not currently available for your operating system"

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Anonymous Coward]

ACDSee is far better.

Re:Google Picasa 3

[Harlequin80]

Really?

Damn just went and looked that up. I have an old version installed on my linux machine and didn't know they had deprecated the linux version. That sucks.

Re: Google Picasa 3

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a setting to have Picasa store the tags in the file.

Showfoto

[Anna Merikin]

Showfoto, a KDE app, is designed to catalogue image files. That's its only function. If you add Digikam, Showfoto is a front-end to this raw-developing and editing program.

Re:Showfoto

[Anonymous Coward]

Showfoto, a KDE app, is designed to catalogue image files. That's its only function. If you add Digikam, Showfoto is a front-end to this raw-developing and editing program.

Seconded, I came here to suggest digikam as well. Works well in Linux, has a Windows version (not sure of stability), and better still, it meets the anti-lock-in requirement.

Digikam uses a filesystem hierarchy to represent albums, so no database requirements and the images are always available. Likewise, tagging is configurable and (with a setting change) can store the tags inside the images' EXIF data, so that the tags are theoretically portable to other apps. As a bonus, storing the tags in the EXIF data means you can use something like exiftool and some scripting to perform arbitrary actions on specific tags or groups of tags.

Re:Showfoto

[WillKemp]

Yeah, Digikam's the best i've found so far - but it doesn't work very well under gnome unfortunately, and i don't like kde. I've tried pretty much all the Linux photo organisation software and Digikam's best so far - even with its gnome incompatibility. All in all, the issue of managing photos seems to be constantly problematic.

Re:Showfoto

[Anna Merikin]

Truth be told, I don't use Showfoto/Digikam anymore since Showfoto's indexing only seems to work if the default directory is in /home/user; since I use a small SSD for my installation and a larger disk partition for data, it is of little use to me. I have switched to duplicating SD-card directory structure by date and depending on my human memory --- just the way I did for film.

Re:Showfoto

[WillKemp]

Why don't you mount your data partition on /home? That's what i'd do if my o/s was on an SSD - regardless of whether i used digikam or not.

Automatic rating

[Clifton Beach]

Just post them all on "Hot or not"

Re:Automatic rating

[Tablizer]

Just post them all on "Hot or not"

I don't think a parent wants The Internet rating their 11-year-old daughter's anterior end (especially if the score is extremely high or low.)

Software doesn't really matter

[Zocalo]

Unless you have some really workflow/hardware your source images are going to be in either JPEG, your camera's proprietary raw format, or both. JPEG supports a standard method of tagging via EXIF directly in the image that includes a "Rating" tag that any tool is going to use. If you are tagging raw files then make sure that you write out the tagging information into .XMP "Sidecar" files. This is an Adobe defined "standard" based around XML files, but it's extremely portable and just about any image editor/tagger that supports .XMP files will follow the core Adobe standard tags, including the ones for rating images, and since it's XML you'll always have access to the tag data if the worst should happen and to roll your own tools if need be. As long as you choose software that supports one or both of those formats, then you'll be fine and about as futureproof as it's possible to be.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[Wycliffe]

This really seems like the way to go. You say software doesn't matter but the first couple pieces of software
I tried to use seemed to want to create a database or some other proprietary way of storing the metadata.
I would have no problem with a proprietary cache as long as the actual metadata is saved with the original
image. Shotwell, picassa, digikam, and gthumb seem to be the more popular ones. Do you know if any of
those support in-place metadata or is there something else you would recommend? Shotwell wanted to
import my images, removing them from the original location while digikam wanted to create a separate
database for the metadata. Something that supported in-place tagging would be much preferred over those.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[rongten]

Hi there,

For archiving purposes, it is best to never touch the original files. It helps when you have thousands of files and during the years you have made backups on different places/disks.

When you consolidate (because either you consolidate or you lose your photos/memories) if you have photos that differ only for the exif tags is a nightmare to understand which photos are ok and which are not.

Always prefer programs that do not touch your photos. I recently found that one of the programs I used in the past for an old camera (2002-2005), when rotating the images was nuking the exif data.. Still need to find which one it was.. and damn it to hell.

Now it would be great to do .xmp of jpegs, but last time I tried (a few months ago) I did not manage to make it work with shotwell (there is only an option to alter the file metadata.. the horror..).

In my case, to consolidate the photo collection, I have the originals in different folders (tematic, cronological etc. etc) and then I create some symlinks in a directory called "history". Here a work in progress

#!/volume1/homes/admin/local_programs/bin/bash
#set -x
EXT="jpg JPG jpeg JPEG"
#DEBUG="echo"
num=0
for exte in $EXT
do
for file in $(find . -name '*'.$exte| grep -v history); do
echo "doing $file"
OCDATE=$CDATE
OCHOUR=$(echo $CHOUR | awk -F'.estim' '{print $1}')
INFO=$(exiftool $file | tr '\n' '#')
PROBLEM=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "^Make")
[ -z "$PROBLEM" ] && echo "Problem with $file. Skipping" && continue
CDATE=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Media Create Date" | awk '{print $5}')
[ -z "$CDATE" ] && CDATE=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Create Date" | awk '{print $4}')
[ -z "$CDATE" ] && CDATE=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Date/Time Original" | awk '{print $5}')
[ -z "$CDATE" ] && CDATE=$OCDATE
[ -z "$CDATE" ] && echo "error inquiry file" $file && continue
CHOUR=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Media Create Date" | awk '{print $6}')
[ -z "$CHOUR" ] && CHOUR=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Create Date" | awk '{print $5}')
[ -z "$CHOUR" ] && CHOUR=$(echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "Date/Time Original" | awk '{print $5}')
[ -z "$CHOUR" ] && num=$(expr $num + 1) && CHOUR=${OCHOUR}.estimation_$num
[ -z "$CHOUR" ] && echo "error inquiry file" $file && continue
TYPE=$( echo $INFO |tr '#' '\n' | grep "File Type" | awk '{print $4}')
YEAR=$( echo $CDATE | cut -d':' -f1)
MONTH=$(echo $CDATE | cut -d':' -f2)
DAY=$( echo $CDATE | cut -d':' -f3)
FNAME=$(echo $CHOUR | tr ':' '-')
FNAME=${FNAME}.$TYPE
DDIR=history/$YEAR/$MONTH
DEST=${DDIR}/${DAY}-${FNAME}
[ ! -d "$DDIR" ] && $DEBUG mkdir -p $DDIR
if [ ! -L "$DEST" ]; then
$DEBUG ln -s ./../../../$file $DEST
else
TGT=$(readlink $DEST)
[ "$TGT" != "./../../../$file" ] && echo "Error whith $file and $DEST" && exit 1
fi
done
d

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[abell]

If anybody wants to implement such a system from scratch, I would advise against modifying the image files, since that makes deduplication and backups harder (you backup a file, than tag one copy and now have two different files).

Building on some ideas I'm using in a backup software I'm working on (please take a look and give feedback if you have some time to spare) I would suggest associating tags and exif info to an hash value of the image files. This way, getting info about a file would be: read file -> compute hash -> retrieve info on that hash.

For quick lookups from hash to file, you can have another table storing the paths where the file with the given hash was seen.

So, table 1 (image metadata) would look like:

d012f68144ed0f121d3cc330a17eec528c2e7d59 | holiday 2013
d012f68144ed0f121d3cc330a17eec528c2e7d59 | dog running
d012f68144ed0f121d3cc330a17eec528c2e7d59 | vote:5
...

while table 2 (hash to file lookup) would look like:

d012f68144ed0f121d3cc330a17eec528c2e7d59 | /home/user/pictures/2013/IMG_123.JPG
...

This way, metadata (table 1) is in a simple and future-proof format, provided you don't modify the original files, which I think is a bad idea anyway. Besides, this doesn't impact your ability of organizing pictures in folders whatever way you like. The only issue can be the need to refresh table2 every now and then.

Just my 2c...

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Photoshop Elements Organizer is the best product I have ever seen, used and taught. Any version from Photoshop Elements 7 or newer is all you will ever need.
It will probably run in Wine on Linux. If your prefer Linux, consider using a virtual XP or 7 machine and install PSE 7+ and enjoy.
One of my students has just passed 40,000 photos in her library.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes no sense. You have the worst of both worlds. Can't edit the files or you lose your metadata, and the metadata isn't in the file. In this scenario, your external metadata should not rely on the original file not changing. Make the hash based on the exif digitized/creation time?

Why not just put all the metadata in the exif in the JPEG? I tag all my photos once, and never change the tags, so really after the first import, the images don't change. But if I did want to edit them, I don't lose my tagging.

my 3c

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[crath]

You're exactly on the money!!! What's needed is a cataloging app that keeps the canonical data store in sidecar files. Picasa is "almost" there. In recent versions it writes most of its data to .picasa text files (an open data format). This provides future portability because another app can read those .picasa files and the image files to rebuild the database. Hopefully, Google will continue to expand Picasa so that it writes all info to .picasa files as well as keeping a local database current. The local database provides excellent app performance, and the sidecar files provide for future portability when Google decides to walk away from Picasa--which they inevitably will.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[jrumney]

I use Shotwell, and it definitely has an option to write the metadata to files, so you can recover it later or from another program. The database is necessary for search - you don't want it to have to open each file one by one to find the image you are looking for.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[Dutch Gun]

Personally, I definitely want metadata to be stored in the image file itself, because if you do it any other way, there's always a risk of losing that association. I feel you're setting yourself up for a disaster if you use a hash, because the moment anything touches that file for *any reason*, poof, that metadata is now gone. You're highlighted the huge weakness in your system, but then created a tautology by saying "but modifying the original files is a bad idea anyway". It's only a bad idea if you've got a fragile system that depends on the exact file hash to reference critical metadata.

I think there's a reason that the XMP standard goes through great pains to embed metadata inside the image files themselves rather than resorting to external sidecar files, which is typically considered a last resort and a very poor alternative solution. If you use the image's own embedded metadata as the original and authoritative source, then you can rebuild your database from scratch automatically, no matter what you've done with your image files, or how you've folded, spindled, or mutilated them.

De-duplication is trivial if you use proper tools which compare visual features and don't rely on exact matches. Also, I don't consider the backup issue to be significant, because if you make a change to the file's metadata, then I want that file re-backed up, because I consider it to have been changed. However, since you're not changing the actual image data when you change metadata, any decent diff program should only store a small delta to represent the change.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[abell]

Let me expand on why modifying the original files is (IMHO) a bad idea, independently of my proposed solution.

When you edit an image, you should keep the original version anyway, because otherwise you are going to lose information. In this case, you are not modifying the original file, but creating a derived work (for which, I agree, you would want the same tags applied automatically based on some image matching algo).

If you change multiple copies of an image independently, you need to merge those changes somehow. Basically, you end up with the problems concurrent revision systems solve (and the complexity that entails). Merging two database tables with a common simple structure is a trivial task.

Deduplication is much easier if files don't change. I have the exact same file in two directories: delete one copy. I have two files with an almost identical image but different tags, cropping or other. That needs manual intervention and is error prone.

Twenty years from now, I prefer to still have the picture I took, rather than a version with some cropping, some sepia filter applied when I thought it was cool, a few rotations randomly applied by the image management program du jour and a re-encoding or two for measure. I'd also rather avoid relying on the backup software I used twenty years ago and I may have stopped using in the meanwhile to retrieve a previous version.

Having said this, it's as usual a question of compromises. Just use the one which better works for you and your workflow.

Re:Software doesn't really matter

[Dutch Gun]

I think I see where we're going wrong here. I agree you don't want to edit the original picture data, but you're conflating that with the notion of editing the image *file*, which occurs when you edit the embedded metadata. That's what I was referring to. Those are two totally different things.

Anyhow, of course, you can do what you feel works best for you, so long as you're happy with the results.

Keep It Simple

[pubwvj]

Keep It Simple
This is something you want to work for decades.
Don't get fancy.
Don't use image organization software that will stop being supported or become useless with an OS update that kills off legacy software.

Just name your files well.
Establish a format for naming.
Organize images in directories / folders.
Use the operating system search feature.

K.I.S.S.

Re:Keep It Simple

[itzly]

Just name your files well.

Mine are all called DSCNxxxx.JPG.

Re:Keep It Simple

[ubrgeek]

But those are all from your trip to Disney in China, right?

Re:Keep It Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Well played.

Re:Keep It Simple

[itzly]

I usually don't take many photos on a holiday. Maybe one or two per day. I realized that I never look at them anyway, so I decided that taking the pictures was a waste of time and effort.

Re:Keep It Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes. See how informative and simple this scheme is. The only problem is I have to have them all in different folders because they all have the same name.

Re:Keep It Simple

[thegarbz]

This is something you want to work for decades.

It is something which has worked POORLY for decades. You have effectively limited yourself to a single description for any file. The folder structure doesn't work if you like the ability to search by metadata.

Metadata opens up a whole world of different options. I can search by my capture equipment: Camera, Lens, focal length, shutter speed. Sounds useless but I can instantly extract every night photo out of my library or every long exposure with a single click.

With tagging I can instantly bring up all pictures of cityscapes, mountains, the ocean, I can show you all the photos of Andrew I have taken. I can sort by Weddings, by Birthday Parties or by drunken night out.

My new favourite (as someone who travels a lot) I can show you photos based on geolocation. You want the photos I took while on a 4wd tour through the Arab desert? I can just zoom in a bit and click on the map. Want all my photos in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower? Even if I didn't tag them with Eiffel Tower I can just zoom in and click on a map.

The Keep It Simple Stupid approach works only if you have Stupidly Simple requirements for what you want.

We can do better.

Re:Keep It Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is something which has worked POORLY for decades. You have effectively limited yourself to a single description for any file."

Perhaps you're not aware that you can store keywords within the metadata and the operating system will search that quite nicely. I've been using this method for decades and it works very well for my over 100,000 images.

You're arrogance and antagonism are not necessary. Just because you fail to use tools that are available doesn't mean those tools don't work.

Re:Keep It Simple

[dargaud]

There are plenty of tools or scripts that will rename your files according to the time the image was taken. Make sure you use some variation of YYYYMMDDHHMMSS as it's in lexicographic order when sorting. I wrote my own.

By Kids Ages

[Anonymous Coward]

I unload my camera SD cards into folders named by the unload date. This drives my wife crazy especially when we're using multiple cameras, phones, etc.

So I wrote a script that will parse the folder structure by file date and then create separate folders containing symlinks to the original files. Folders are arranged by Year/Month and also another set for each kid (Kid1-06month, Kid2-14month, etc). I can unload her camera into '2014-12-14_WifesPhone', run my script, and the symlinks all appear in the proper year/month folders along with all the photos from other media.

Then I share it to her laptop by SAMBA and everything sorts in logical order. She loves it. When she wants to see all the photos for Kid 1 @ 3 months old, they're all in the kid1-3month folder, regardless of what device it came from or when I got around to unloading the SD card.

Re:By Kids Ages

[Arkh89]

On a side note : IMO, You should have started indexing your kids at 0...

Re:By Kids Ages

[Anonymous Coward]

1-indexing is principally better than 0-indexing, because it is more intuitive, logical and less error-prone.

Re:By Kids Ages

[Anonymous Coward]

(OP here)

I did.

My wife could not grasp that the kids were 0 months old at birth. "Until the END of the first month, they're still 0 months old", I told her.

So our family photo albums are all titled, "Baby's 1st month", "Baby's 2nd month", etc. because I couldn't bear to see photos of a newborn titled "1 month old".

Too bad we can't all be programmers.

Re:By Kids Ages

[dcollins117]

1-indexing is principally better than 0-indexing, because it is more intuitive, logical and less error-prone.

If my wife and I were truly error prone we wouldn't have this indexing problem in the first place.

Re:By Kids Ages

[twitnutttt]

LOL.

Re:By Kids Ages

[Anonymous Coward]

Disagree. When I used Turbo Pascal, with 1-indexed arrays, off by one errors happened all the time. When I switched to C, with 0-indexed arrays, off by one errors suddenly became a rare occurrence, because while we are used to 1-indexing, with 0-indexing, adding and multiplying indexes just works, where as with 1-indexing you need to remember to subtract 1 otherwise you'll suddenly be using 2-indexing.

Digikam

[Anonymous Coward]

A little buggy at times. Multi platform with external database capable. Geotag and face tag integrated.
The external DB allows multiple users on different systems to use the same tagging on different computers and os.

Re:Digikam

[dotancohen]

I came to suggest Digikam. If it the absolute best free photo manager for any platform. It supports geo-tagged photos, a slew of editing functions in a dedicated editor, automatic camera download and renaming, tagging, blah blah blah.

Re:digiKam

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't mention something I consider to be a great feature of digikam's tagging system: it can store it in the EXIF data instead of an internal database. Helps solve the submitter's lock-in avoidance and lets you use things like exiftool and some scripting to search for tags and perform arbitrary actions on matching files.

It's likewise nice that the albums are sorted using the filesystem hierarchy in a human-readable way, rather than using some freakish database scheme

Re:digiKam

[WillKemp]

Yes, Digikam's good - so long as you use kde. I don't, but i put up with its annoying gnome incompatibilities because it's the best there is - and i've tried all the rest.

Re:digiKam

[Anonymous Coward]

DigiKam works for me as intended under Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE.

Re:digiKam

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Yes, Digikam's good - so long as you use kde. I don't, but i put up with its annoying gnome incompatibilities because it's the best there is - and i've tried all the rest.

That doesn't make sense - "so long as you use kde" + "I don't".

As for GNOME incompatabilities - can you expand on the "incompatabilities" and conflicts you have? Have you filed bug reports?
Or do you mean digiKam doesn't use the same libraries that GNOME does to perform vaguely similar tasks (QT/GTK, gfs/kio, etc, etc) - which would hardly be surprising.... Disclaimer: I used to have to use GNOME for work - and always found it's lack of configuration as ugly as the GNOME looks and way of doing things. But that's just a personal taste and programmers perspective.

I can confirm, as the result of several years daily use, that both KDE and digiKam work very well, and that digiKam works very well on boxen that don't have the KDE metapackage installed. e.g. on netbooks running xfce

Agreed on the digiKam to competition comparison - I've used Adobe products for years (result of client environments) - digiKam is better for my purposes (maintaining very large databases of client images for publication/web sites/promotion purposes).

$ apt-cache depends digikam
Depends: kde-runtime, libc6, libgcc1, libgomp1, libgphoto2-2, libgphoto2-port0, libjasper1, libjpeg8, libkdcraw20, libkdecore5, libkdeui5, libkdewebkit5, libkexiv2-10, libkfile4, libkhtml5, libkio5, libkipi8, libknotifyconfig4, libkparts4, liblcms1, liblensfun0, liblqr-1-0, libmarblewidget13, libnepomuk4, libopencv-core2.3, libopencv-highgui2.3, libopencv-imgproc2.3, libopencv-legacy2.3, libopencv-objdetect2.3, libphonon4, libpng12-0, libqjson0, libqt4-dbus, libqt4-network, libqt4-qt3support, libqt4-sql, libqt4-xml, libqtcore4, libqtgui4, libqtwebkit4, libsolid4, libsoprano4, libstdc++6, libtiff4, libx11-6, phonon, libqt4-sql-sqlite, digikam-data, digikam-doc
Recommends: <www-browser>, conkeror, dillo, elinks-lite, elvis-console, lynx-cur, netsurf, netsurf-fb, netsurf-gtk, uzbl, chimera2, chromium, elinks, elvis, epiphany-browser, google-chrome-beta, google-chrome-stable, google-chrome-unstable, iceweasel, konqueror, links, links2, midori, netrik, rekonq, surf, w3m
Recommends: kipi-plugins
Recommends: mplayerthumbs

That's about 40MB if installed with --no-install-recommends (assume the OP already has a browser) and unless you are using digiKam or one of it's dependencies (e.g. phonon) GNOME is not using more resources. Note that phonon itself is unnecessary for digiKam usage (it uses it for video sound) - just use equiv to replace it if it offends your inner GNOME.

Re:digiKam

[miach]

I run on both windows and linux and haven't had any problems under windows (and with the save-tags-in-metadata feature not using the same db is not a problem).

Re:digiKam

[WillKemp]

Yes, Digikam's good - so long as you use kde. I don't, but i put up with its annoying gnome incompatibilities because it's the best there is - and i've tried all the rest.

That doesn't make sense - "so long as you use kde" + "I don't".

How can it not make sense? Digikam's not good if you use Gnome. It's usable, but some functions don't work.

As for GNOME incompatabilities - can you expand on the "incompatabilities" and conflicts you have? Have you filed bug reports?

Some things don't work. I've recently upgraded Fedora and i haven't tried Digikam with the new version, so i don't know if the problems are the same. But previously, image "tool tips" (i.e., showing metadata etc when you hover the mouse pointer over a thumbnail) were blank, and the preview image was blank - which was rather annoying. No, i haven't filed bug reports as i haven't checked if they are bugs (by testing it with KDE) or just incompatibilities with Gnome. Digikam is a KDE application and it never claims to work with Gnome.

Re:digiKam

[Anonymous Coward]

But previously, image "tool tips" (i.e., showing metadata etc when you hover the mouse pointer over a thumbnail) were blank, and the preview image was blank - which was rather annoying.

That sounds like you're missing a library or binary that it uses, or that the library itself was broken for some reason, rather than a problem with GNOME compatibility. I tested with a couple different WMs/environments on Debian (no GNOME, though; not installed) and had no problems with that, regardless of the status of the rest of KDE.

If it's still a problem in the updated version, install a minimal window manager -- fluxbox usually works well for this -- and the Xephyr X server and try running digikam inside the nested X server. See if it works properly there or not. Example of how to do that with shell commands and fluxbox:

Xephyr -screen 1024x768 :7
env DISPLAY=:7 fluxbox&
env DISPLAY=:7 digikam&

(replace 1024x768 with whatever resolution you want)

See if it's working there or if it's broken as well. If it's broken there too, start checking what dependencies (either required or optional) are missing, maybe even compare to what Debian has as reqs. It could even be a packaging error that's not installing the right lib. One possible culprit is libkexiv2 (a Qt wrapper for libexiv2), or maybe it's a random Qt lib for UI stuff.

Re:digiKam

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Yes, Digikam's good - so long as you use kde. I don't, but i put up with its annoying gnome incompatibilities because it's the best there is - and i've tried all the rest.

That doesn't make sense - "so long as you use kde" + "I don't".

How can it not make sense? Digikam's not good if you use Gnome. It's usable, but some functions don't work.

Does not parse??
I asked you to expand on your original point....
Since then, for the sake of completeness, I've installed (shudder) GNOME (on Debian STABLE, not Fedora as I'm too old to be comfortable with the hourly upgrades and sitting on the bleeding edge of almost working), and found no problems with any features. So again (gently)
have you filed bug reports? (lest, despite imagining best intention you are just pissing on the furniture and complaining there was no toilet under your dick).
Don't take that the wrong way.

As for GNOME incompatabilities - can you expand on the "incompatabilities" and conflicts you have (i.e. error messages, missing recommended pacakges (stuff don't work is not instructive when we don't know what you installed, and until now didn't even mention a distro let-alone a release)? Have you filed bug reports? (how do you expect "things to be fixed otherwise?"), please don't wail without making a modicum of effort to contribute to the effort to raise the standard.

Some things don't work. I've recently upgraded Fedora and i haven't tried Digikam with the new version, so i don't know if the problems are the same.

(relevance - and thanks for raising the standards?) As previously stated, I agree digiKam is the best of it's breed, and we'd like to make it better - your input (useful that is) would be greatly appreciated.

But previously, image "tool tips" (i.e., showing metadata etc when you hover the mouse pointer over a thumbnail) were blank, and the preview image was blank - which was rather annoying. No, i haven't filed bug reports as i haven't checked if they are bugs (by testing it with KDE) or just incompatibilities with Gnome. Digikam is a KDE application and it never claims to work with Gnome.

It doesn't have to work with GNOME - nor does it rely on the entirity of KDE - and, more importantly, I don't know where you got the falacious idea that it won't/shouldn't work with GNOME

small hint: "I didn't" is a form of agressive armchair apathy - it fixes nothing and helps no-one.

Re:digiKam

[WillKemp]

Small hint: writing like a troll just makes you look stupid.

All the bugs i've mentioned have already been reported. And, guess what... They only seem to affect people who don't use kde.

systemd is the best I've found.

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is the best file compression software I've ever found. It got installed on my Debian computer recently. Now all my files on that computer are effectively 0 bytes in size, because I can't access them at all because my frigging system won't even boot.

Re:systemd is the best I've found.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to the idiots OS then, winblows.

Re:systemd is the best I've found.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused. What you're saying is self-contradictory. Why would he install Windows on that computer, when systemd is already installed? Systemd is pretty much Windows, at least from the user's perspective. They both share the same monolithic, non-UNIX philosophy, leading to the same user experience. Why would he install Windows just to get the same experience he's already getting?

Re:systemd is the best I've found.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this problem. One computer with systemd won't boot. Another different piece of hardware with systemd won't shut down (filesystems never unmount). Only two systems out of hundreds installed with sysVinit. Systemd is pre-alpha software getting rolled into production OSes. I fear for the future of early adopter businesses.

Re:systemd is the best I've found.

[Anonymous Coward]

So on average, they're working perfectly. What's the problem?

Software doesn't really matter

[Anonymous Coward]

This is excellent info. So the next question would be for a tool that modifies EXIF data that's got a nice UI and is OSS cross-platform or per-platform.

Image Organization

[fyngyrz]

A database (sqlite would do fine), a little Python (sqlite included), an image display program (painless if we're talking jpeg/gig/png, might be knotty for RAW DSLR images) and thou.

Open source, features up to you, no lock in because you can export it to any format you're willing to take the time to fool with. Best environment for this kind of undertaking is a web browser and some CGI, both of which, under linux as you prefer, are easily handled.

Image organization is a pretty minimal undertaking, if that's all one is really really after. The database will do the vast majority of the work. Just make sure you provide fields for everything that matters to you, or might matter to you, and then USE them.

Ubuntu, for one, has everything you need for the jpg/png/gif case built right in. RAW DSLR, as mentioned, will require some work.

Re:Image Organization

[ihtoit]

as long as you have the relevant filters in place, you should be fine. I run everything through a WAMP stack, including RAW format, for thumbnailing (via Imagemagick) etc on a wiki-type interface. So what you see on that is basically png tiles which link to metadata (kept in a mysql table) and the full resolution originals. Shit works. :)

Re:Image Organization

[fyngyrz]

Just took a look at Imagemagick; they've definitely come a long way in RAW support. But I'm a little confused about what they mean by:

CR2 R Canon Digital Camera Raw Image Format Requires an explicit image format otherwise the image is interpreted as a TIFF image (e.g. cr2:image.cr2).

  Does it read CR2 or not? I have a 6D DSLR, so CR2 support was the first thing I looked for. Then there are the RAW, S-RAW and M-RAW variants.

Just curious.

Re:Image Organization

[Anonymous Coward]

The OP asked for a software solution, and your response is that he/she needs to become a database and Python programmer. How clueless can you be?

Re:Image Organization

[esldude]

I certainly agree with this sentiment. Guy wants software to use, not to create it himself. Advice like this is why people don't listen to you.

Re:Image Organization

[Anonymous Coward]

CR2 is based on a tiff format but is raw (unprocessed) data stored in a tiff format container vs. a tiff file containing processed image. Imagemagick would normally identify it as a regular tiff file based on the file signature unless you explicitly prefix the file with cr2: and override the signature (magic number).

Re:Image Organization

[ihtoit]

uh... solutions exist, and you don't need to be a Whiz Kid to use it.

I have pointed one out: WAMP, in the form of a wiki (Bitnami Mediawiki, which comes *with* Imagemagick, do I have to do fucking *everything*??)

Re:Image Organization

[ihtoit]

short answer: yes, it does.

source: I process my brother's 5D cards.

Re:Image Organization

[ihtoit]

6D even. Hard to see these keys in near total darkness.

Re:Image Organization

[rtb61]

OK simplest software solution. Place all photos in one directory, the create links/shortcuts to those photos in different appropriately titled directories. Now create the appropriate directory structure so as to best access those images and retitle those links/shortcuts as appropriate. It can all be done with a typical file manager even though it is a long, slow process, absolutely no lock in at all, no changes at all to original image, just be careful when you think you are copying images that you are not just copying links/shortcuts ;).

Re:Image Organization

[fyngyrz]

...but it saves on random number generator cycles...

Re:Image Organization

[fyngyrz]

That was all software, you know. Free, too.

Re:Image Organization

[Kariles70]

Yep. Typical response from a techie that doesn't understand the question. Ask them the time and they'll try to tell you how a watch works. This way they don't get the info coming or going but the techie living in his parents basement gets to feel good about himself until its time to go back and play the Sims. He walks away thinking he impressed someone and they look at him as an imbecile, which he is.

Re:Image Organization

[fyngyrz]

Gosh-o-gosh. Techies on slashdot? What's the world coming to?!?!

You wanted me to just say "iPhoto", right?

lol...

Re:Image Organization

[Anonymous Coward]

do I have to do fucking *everything*??

While you did point out a solution (roll your own using these things), I don't think the person wants to roll their own. I think they want some pre-built package, like, for example, whatever e621.net uses.

(Warning, do not visit e621.net at work.)

Exiftool, Exiv2 or Python

[Anonymous Coward]

i've been using exiftool for a while to date rename and sort by year. Tried exiv2 for the same. Recently I've written a python script that builds an image list and performs the same function as exiftool. It's a bit more flexible and I'm planning on extending it to find duplicates. Happy to upload to GitHub if there's interrest. Also recommend plex and photo sync. Soon as I walk on the door photos from my phone are copied to server to be sorted later on.

Re:Exiftool, Exiv2 or Python

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be interested in the python script.

I'm planning to rename all the files based their date, and put some hash data in there too, then toss it up on a private semantic image board.

Google Plus

[technomom]

Google Plus Photos - you'll be able to use regular search for your photos ("my pictures from Cape Cod", "blue", "pictures of fish", etc.) plus you can at any time use Google Takeout to export all your pictures to someplace else.

Re:Google Plus

[ihtoit]

sure, until they pull it.

Have you heard they're planning on pulling the plug on GMail and putting up something called Inbox that's supposed to integrate with the desktop??

The fuck?? I've used GMail for fucking years, I think I better start thinking about buying my own domain and running my own email server... the whole point of GMail was that I didn't have to run my own mail server!

Anything that's OS independent?

[Dadoo]

As long as we're on the subject, I'd like to know about such software, too, but I'd like something that's OS independent, and stores images locally. My mom has an enormous collection of family photos, dating back to the early 20th century, that I'd like to catalog while she's still around. It would be nice if she could do the annotations on her Windows machine, while I organize everything on my Linux machine. Ideally, we could copy the images and associated data back and forth using a CDROM or USB key.

Re:Anything that's OS independent?

[ihtoit]

LAMP it with a Mediawiki service (go cloud or local). No need to back-n-forth with any usb key, just drop a shortcut on her desktop and make her an account, it's just a case then of upload the picture, create a page for it with the metadata on it, job done.

My images are organised on a mediawiki stack, paged by date. it works fucking brilliantly. Text search on what I type on the page next to each image, boom motherfucker.

Re:Anything that's OS independent?

[fu-ku-jitsu]

vvvP: http://vvvp.sourceforge.net/ Open source. Linux, Mac and Windows.

ACDSee

[Anonymous Coward]

Best for your porn.

Store new pics in folders named by date

[Huitzilo.]

Tagging images by hand is fun... for five minutes. Use a tool that downloads new pics from your camera into folders named by the date the pictures were taken. Then you can mostly reconstruct later where and why the images were taken and tag them when you feel like it (or just leave it). I used Digikam for years while I was still on Linux. It does the job extremely well. It's well maintained with new releases quite frequently. I didn't notice any performance issues with 10k+ photos, and I'd trust it can handle way more than that. Since I'm on OSX I switched to Lightroom. No problems with the migration, all starring etc. that I made in digikam is still intact. Lightroom is just much, much better at deveoping DNGs. That's what it was developed for, after all. Wouldn't want to miss it.

Cataloging write-only archives

[namgge]

Based on my experience as an executor, you should pick the best one or two photos from each significant occasion, record the date, location and the people (forename and surname) it shows in a plain text file and trash the rest. Fortunately chronological order is both the easiest and best way of organising such a collection. Don't bother keeping pictures that don't have clearly recognisable people in them because it's only these that will be of any interest in future.

Then, when you die your kids will inherit a nice collection of ca 100 family photos complete with enough information to make them interesting and give them a context.

Namgge

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Harlequin80]

Please GOD don't do this!

If you want to create a best of album to pass on to your kids then by all mean to that. But don't trash the rest! Storage is cheap so there is no reason you shouldn't keep everything. One of the best finds I ever had from my great grandparents was a suitcase full of old photos taken around the turn of the century. Most of them were of random life, and even though I didn't know who the people were it was a fascinating insight into how they lived. It was only 110 years ago but I found the differences incredible and much more relatable in photo form then in a book.

I have just over 60gb of digital photos now. Many of them are crap. Another chunk are essentially duplicates where I have taken 20 photos to capture a moment. What we do is put together a highlights book for each year. We actually print them using a company that makes coffee book style books. It's a lot of work, sifting through the images, editing and cropping them and then finally putting them together in a 40-60 page book. But it is so worth it. We now have 13 of these books and we will start on 2014 shortly.

Re: Cataloging write-only archives

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between finding your grandparents' trove of old pics and your current digital approach is that you probably can't even open your email message storage file from 1999. Or view your home videos from 1988 (let's see, need a VCR, an adapter for the minicassettes, hope the tape hasn't degraded....) Or have a reader for your first digital camera storage card.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[juancnuno]

Many of them are crap. Another chunk are essentially duplicates where I have taken 20 photos to capture a moment.

Why keep the crap? Why keep the duplicates? When I organize pictures from a trip or whatever into an album my tools are a file manager, an image viewer, and a couple of really simple Java programs I wrote to rename files in bulk. As part of the process I delete the crap and the duplicates. I pick the one out of twenty pictures that best captures the moment and delete the rest.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't trash the rest! Storage is cheap so there is no reason you shouldn't keep everything.

Ick! Absolutely DO NOT keep everything. You want to keep a good signal to noise ratio.

For example, if I take 15 exposures of a single composition, I'll keep the best exposure and trash the rest. I've already done the work of determining which exposure is worth keeping, I don't want to come back 5 years from now and have to redo the work of determining which one is worth keeping. The same goes for overly similar images. If a new image does not add any additional context from what is provided by another image, and has no particular artistic value of it's own right, pick the best and move along. Life is too short.

To go off of your example of looking at 100-year-old images, looking at the highlights from 100 years ago is one thing. Looking through 100k+ duplicates is another, and the signal is likely to be lost in all that noise.

Re: Cataloging write-only archives

[Harlequin80]

Jpeg has been the standard for years now, I doubt very much that it will become inaccessible anytime soon. And the best thing about digitised photos is the don't degrade like the physical versions. Proprietary mail storage files are not really comparable.

The other nice thing about digital is that all it takes is a codec to read something. I don't need to dig out the old vcr etc.

As for the old home videos, I made the concious decision about 5 years ago to transfer all of them to digital for exactly the reasons you outlined. So I spent days going through all mine and my parents videos and captured them on a pc. I also worked with my dad to scan every single photo and slide that he had. It took us 2 years and we went through 4 scanners in the process but they are now done. We also worked through them naming and dating them as best we could.

And finally why would I have a reader for my first digital camera? I don't even own it anymore and I can't even remember what type of cards it took (I think it was CF). I have transferred them onto my NAS and will have reused the card multiple times. They're not like film canisters.....

In the end there is no guarantee that my system will be readable in x years time. But using common standards, such as jpeg, and LTO tapes to back them up mean chances are they will be for someone who cares enough to look. In addition I print the yearly summary that exist in the physical world and requires no special interface to use.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Harlequin80]

Because why delete them? It's not like the storage is expensive and I have learned that what you want to see in photos changes over time. And by crap I mean, daughter pulling a stupid face, or slightly blurry, or taken just after the event I wanted to capture. They still contain a memory. They just aren't what I would put on the wall.

Also the duplicates are not identical, they are all slightly different, just separated by less than a second. Google+ does cool things with those. I was rather commenting on the OPs decision to keep 1 delete the rest.

As for your process, it is more involved than what I do. Mine is, plug in memory card, click transfer. Files are now renamed and in the right place. It is also done almost exclusively by my wife who takes a gazillion photos a day of our kids. I think the big difference is you are talking about photos taken on a trip. We would take 10+ photos every day.

As for picking 1 photo that captures the moment I do something similar, the difference is I choose the photo I want, copy it out and leave the complete collection untouched. I currently have 95839 digital photos with the first being take 26/1/2004

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Harlequin80]

If it is a static composition then I agree with you. ie if I have arranged something for a photoshoot and I am simply moving between exposure levels etc then pick the best and move on. But most of the multi-exposures I am talking about are trying to catch a photo of a child running around or something similar.

As I have also said I run two separate collections. One is that you have described, pick the best pic. The other is an exhaustive collection of everything ever taken. I guess I don't see any reason to delete the source material. I would take the same approach if I was making a movie. I might shoot 20hrs of footage to have a 15 minute clip at the end. I'm still going to keep the 20hrs of footage. I may never ever ever look at it again. But I would rather invest the negligible cost of storage on the off chance I might.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[twitnutttt]

Good advice, but I would tweak it thusly to trim the unnecessary text file: Since you are organizing chronologically, you probably have folder names that are dates... So just add the location/event/people tags to the folder name. E.g.: 2014-04-03 Birthday with Grandma in Las Vegas. =)

Re: Cataloging write-only archives

[Jake Dodgie]

Speak for your self, my emails go back to 1988 and even worse are in a propriator format - Outlook front end on Exchange backend, but odly enough I can get em on my OSX PC at home and my andriod phone when I'm anywhere else, don't bet on formats for important stuff going out of sytle any time soon.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Anonymous Coward]

You are close.

That is almost what professional photographers have been doing for ages.

1st run through photos, destroy the technically bad ones. Blurred, shaken, out of focus, too dark & too much noise, overburned that are deemed unrepairable, peoples eyes closed when they should be open, shadows in wrong place, super bad facial expressions etc. Trash them

At this point you archieve the pictures with subject line for the set, date, location of shoot, etc info. You archieve the RAW images you have (or .jpgs, urgh)
Now move this archive copy to safe places and forget you have it before you need it again. Might be never. These are your digital negatives you'll keep forever.

2nd run you pick the images you will post process, this is where you will pick the ones with best expressions and best captures the moments, select just one of the duplicates etc. trash the rest.

Then just process the ones you selected, maybe 10% of all the images, or slightly more if you are really good with the camera.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Bender0x7D1]

Just curious - how often do you take out the albums? I have several albums (military pictures) that might see the light of day every 2-3 years, if that.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Anonymous Coward]

After both my parents died, there were very few photographs of everyday life and what my be called cultural history - no photographs of their cars, homes, food, clothing, etc, etc. I wish that they had kept more of the photographs that they took, instead of just 1 or 2 posed headshots from each roll of film.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[dcw3]

No, no, no, no, no!

Yes, please do leave something to your family. All of the photos. If you want to make an album of some sort containing your top 100, have at it, but DO NOT "trash the rest"! My dad passed on a couple years ago, and we scrambled to find every photo we had of him, and a couple years later, I still enjoy occasionally sifting through them...it's not a morbid thing, but brings back nice memories.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[John Bokma]

And a good example of why you don't want to do this: Finding Vivian Maier.

Re:Cataloging write-only archives

[Harlequin80]

Probably every 3 months or so. But I will be honest and say that that is because of my wife rather than me. She is the photo / memory nut.

It has ended up being one of those things we do of an evening every now and again. Get the albums out and a bottle of wine. I also have all my camcorders loaded into XBMC so they get a run pretty often as well.

Therein lies the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

then be locked into a single piece of software

See, that's the problem. You wouldn't mind being locked into a product if it had every feature you wanted, but there isn't one and why you must just end up using the file system because tagging and commenting are supported by most of them these days.

Re:Therein lies the rub

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. It's the same amount of work if you use a piece of software or the file system. Find a good metadata tool for you operating system and filesystem of choice and go to town making the folders and commenting and tagging your photos and said folders.

Re:Therein lies the rub

[Immerman]

But wha do you do ten years from now when you change operating systems or that mtadata program gets abandoned? All that indexing work out the window. But my "tagged in the filename" collection still works just fine, with cross-platform support in any OS that can perform file name searching on the drive.

There's only one image organizing program

[Applehu Akbar]

Adobe Lightroom. Nothing else even comes close, on OS X or Windows. It organizes sets of images on any combination of storage devices you want, including those disconnected-mostly archives that people with a serious number of photographs always eventually have. It has a tagging system to make searching easy. It gives you control of image metadata. It has most of the editing power of Photoshop with an intuitively easy interface, rather than one that has grown haphazardly bloatwise over the years like PS. It lets you archive everything in RAW if you wish. Editing is nondestructive, so you can peel off prior edits and re-edit an old image at any time. And yes, you can call your favorite external editor, including PS, when you need to do something really fancy.

It's also the only Adobe product that is still reasonably priced and available as an installed program. The others now have to be rented on the company's cloud site.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[mean pun]

I'm very much afraid that you are right. The biggest gripes I have with it is that (a) it comes from Adobe, and (b) the map functions don't work on a case-sensitive file system on Mac OS X.

Adobe for reasons only known to itself absolutely refuses to support case-sensitive file systems for Mac OS X. For Lightroom this `only' means that the map functions don't work (at least in LR 4; LR 5 may be better or worse). For Photoshop it means that it can not even be installed on a case-sensitive file system; the installer refuses to do so. The official fix for this problem is to reformat. This stance of Adobe is at least a decade old (as is Mac OS X support for case-sensitive file systems...). Of course this restriction is not documented in sales documentation.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[Ford Prefect]

Adobe for reasons only known to itself absolutely refuses to support case-sensitive file systems for Mac OS X.

I've heard of various other software breaking when used with case-sensitive filesystems on OS X - not making an excuse for that software, but what is the benefit of running with such a filesystem anyway? I'm genuinely interested.

(I've been running with the default case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystems for a decade or more, and not hit any problems.)

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[schnell]

I'm genuinely curious - what does Lightroom do that iPhoto on OS X doesn't? I have extensive (non-professional) photo archives in iTunes for the easy import, automatic facial recognition, ease of posting to social media etc. but if Lightroom does really awesome stuff I would certainly consider switching.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[David_Hart]

Adobe Lightroom. Nothing else even comes close, on OS X or Windows. It organizes sets of images on any combination of storage devices you want, including those disconnected-mostly archives that people with a serious number of photographs always eventually have. It has a tagging system to make searching easy. It gives you control of image metadata. It has most of the editing power of Photoshop with an intuitively easy interface, rather than one that has grown haphazardly bloatwise over the years like PS. It lets you archive everything in RAW if you wish. Editing is nondestructive, so you can peel off prior edits and re-edit an old image at any time. And yes, you can call your favorite external editor, including PS, when you need to do something really fancy.

It's also the only Adobe product that is still reasonably priced and available as an installed program. The others now have to be rented on the company's cloud site.

You forgot to mention that it also has plugins for various online photo services, social media sites, etc. just in case you decide to want to share them with Aunt Betty in Ohio....

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[Malc]

Timezone handling seems to be very weak as well.

That said, I can't live without Lightroom. I guess I'm going to making LR5 last a very long time because I don't want to change to rental licensing a la creative cloud.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[will_die]

The other option would be Photoshop Elements, which is version for casual users, lightroom has a higher learning requirement.
You should be able to download both for free for limited try out period.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[mean pun]

One example: source trees that come from Linux are blissfully unaware of any restrictions, and may for example have a README and a Readme file. On the default Mac OS X filesystem you just can't store this source tree.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[quetwo]

LR works with RAW files. iTunes/iPhoto converts them to JPEG. You lose all the raw sensor data, and any changes you make to the files are then destructive.

There's 5,000 more reasons why, but that is the biggest that comes to mind...

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[dfsmith]

I run a Linux kernel on 4 out of the 5 PC/laptops I own, and spend 90% of my time screen-time on them. I organize my photos in <shameface>Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer 8</shameface> on Windows. Elements can be made to tag the metadata into the JPEGs so that its database can be reconstructed just from the files, and it has a reasonable tagging interface. However, my photos probably only amount to 500GiB or so, going back to the 1990s, and I don't bother with raw, so my load isn't high.

Re:There's only one image organizing program

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, iPhoto is fine for non-pro collections. As soon as you get serious amount of photos (including raw) iPhoto will choke. Aperture slows down considerably also on large photo collections. Both don't offer any way to export your edits easily. Other than that, they are fine tools for getting the job done. No need to switch if you don't run into any limitations.

I use folders.

[jtownatpunk.net]

Vacation
  |--->October 2011 - Caribbean
                      |--->10-27-2011 - Jamaica

Transfers to/from any platform with a copy/paste.

I keep slimmed down albums (nee: sets) on flickr where I (and others) can add notes.

Re:I use folders.

[Tablizer]

Scotty: "Files? How quaint".

Re:I use folders.

[Anonymous Coward]

With minimal snark, I wonder what you do if you want to find all vacation photos containing seaside shots?

The problem with folders is it's essentially a single index, and while it may work for locating a single photo, it's lousy for locating multiple search terms.

Re:I use folders.

[Harlequin80]

Folders combines with picasa for me. /yyyy-mm-dd-Jamaica/yyyy-mm-dd-imgxxx - Me before sunburn.jpg

Picasa gives me xif data and tags.

Re:I use folders.

[twitnutttt]

Your date format belies your naivete. =) MM-DD-YYYY? Best wishes for the future.

Re:I use folders.

[jtownatpunk.net]

With minimal snark, how hard is it to look at the file names and figure out which ones will have what I'm looking for? If I'm looking thru my pictures, it's because I want to look at my pictures. I'm not worried about being able to search for a specific picture with optimal efficiency.

Re:I use folders.

[Anonymous Coward]

Scale up what you've done and it becomes much more difficult.
Using YYYY-MM-DD and your files will always be sorted by date.
I'm surprised anyone slashdot would use any other date format.

Re:I use folders.

[Malc]

As does using the month name.

yyyy-mm-dd Some description
=> Subfolders as necesary

yyyy-mm-dd to yyyy-mm-dd Some description
=> Subfolders with time stamps, etc

This is in both alphabetical and chronological order.

Re:I use folders.

[jtownatpunk.net]

I'm an American. We do our dates MM-DD-YYYY the way Jebus intended! (Also, I can sort by date with a click on every file manager I've seen in the last 20 years or so. I assume that feature will persist. Since the folders were created in the order the pictures were taken, that'll work just fine for me.)

Re:I use folders.

[jtownatpunk.net]

It's so reassuring to know there are people more pedantic than me.

I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[Anonymous Coward]

When I read this headline, I perked up, because I've been working on software to do just that for the last year and a half. It's currently targeted towards the BlackBerry 10 platform, though. That said, I think my UI design is a good one and you might take some inspiration from it in terms of what is possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OL4c0UtT7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC6nH5jIycY

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[war4peace]

Your application, although very useful, suffers from the same issue all other similarly-oriented applications do: it's boring.
I appreciate your efforts, but you should really ask yourself: what does my app bring to the market? Why would a potential customer use my application and not one of the very many others that are out there?

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[epyT-R]

The software isn't meant to entertain you. It's meant to help organize photos. If you want to be entertained, check out the games section.

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[Neil Boekend]

Why not both? Make a game that allows you to use cattle prods to prod files in the right folders and shoot them with a railgun to either add tags at or delete the file unrecoverable (difference based on the hash of the milisecond time. If the binary printout of that ends with a 1 it adds a tag. If it ends with a 0 it deletes)

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[war4peace]

That's exactly what I was talking about.
Picasa 3 is a very useful image management application, it does face recognition pretty well, but for large image sets it's a PITA to stay focused and put stuff in order. Same goes for pretty much any other media management system out there.
Yes, gamification should really be something to consider, something like image-based Tetris, tag mix-and-match, image-based memory games, etc.

That's exactly why, when I want to listen to music, I usually do that by playing Audiosurf.
It's just feedback, feel free to ignore it, but I just gave you an idea that might help you make a shitload of money. Or not. Your choice :)

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[epyT-R]

Gamification usually results in 'edutainment' type titles that are poor at entertainment and education.

Re:I'm Working on Software To Do Just That

[Neil Boekend]

Poe's law strikes again.

I thought the random delete/tag idea would give it away.

Some useful tools are found thus...

[Anonymous Coward]

xterm -e "aptitude search exiv2 metadata exif|less"

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_metadata_editors

Also consider md5sum to track unique files, but remember to generate the checksum after tagging.

also see fslint-gui

Or for a more GUI approach, as others have suggested digiKam

See section 2 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CBIR_engines

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

do you honestly not know what Picasa or iPhoto is

Re:really?

[epyT-R]

picasa and iphoto suffer from planned obsolescence.

Re:really?

[Harlequin80]

What is the planned obsolescence with Picasa? And how would they enforce it? JPG isn't going anywhere anytime soon and I don't see a shift to a brand new format that picasa doesn't support happening.

Also it runs on all platforms with minimal dependencies.
picasa
    Depends: libc6
    Depends: libasound2
        liboss4-salsa-asound2
    Depends: zlib1g
    Depends: gconf2
    Depends: libfreetype6

Even if picasa was abandoned you can still used it. The software I use for bulk renaming images and transferring off memory cards, pixfer, has been abandoned for years. Still works great.

KISS It

[Camel Pilot]

I use a perl script and organize everything into YYYY/MM/DD directories and then links to another directory composed of sub-directories of tag names that I store in the exif.

Image organization

[Anonymous Coward]

We have the software for organizing images that you require. I does not need or use tags. Organizing is easy and fast and can be organized differently for different users as needed. I am using it on databases of about 20,000 images. The approach does not require you to know that topics when you start. You can add or delete them as needed. Our approach has not been released yet, but we are looking for testers.

Print them all

[julian67]

Print them all and put them in labelled shoeboxes.

Re:Make folders and rename pics

[Anonymous Coward]

It's total bullshit that this is modded down. Until such a time as consumer computers can automatically extract meaning from images and build an OS independent database, the database approach is not really the way to go and using the file system's hierarchy and naming system is adequate and quick and the best we have.

Otherwise, have fun typing all your tags and basically going, "view image #0, add tags 'dog,eddy,camp,summer 2012,2012', view image #1, ...".

I have some 60000 images. Fuck that.

digiKam

[Demonoid-Penguin]

digiKam, free, runs on the major platforms, has the feature you've asked for and all the features you haven't asked for but, based on my experience, you will need.

Quoting from:-

A digiKam Overview

digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for KDE, which makes importing and organizing digital photos a "snap". The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections.

Tired of the folder constraints? Don’t worry, digiKam also provides tagging. You tag your images which can be spread out across multiple folders, and digiKam provides fast and intuitive ways to browse these tagged images. You can also add comments to your images. digiKam makes use of a fast and robust database to store these meta-informations which makes adding and editing of comments and tags very reliable.

digiKam makes use of KIPI plugins for lots of added functionalities. KIPI (KDE Image Plugin Interface) is an initiative to create a common plugin infrastructure for digiKam, KPhotoAlbum, and GwenView. Its aim is to allow development of image plugins which can be shared among KDE graphical applications.

An easy-to-use interface is provided that enables you to connect to your camera and preview, download and/or delete your images. Basic auto-transformations can be deployed on the fly during image downloading.

Another tool, which most artists and photographers will be familiar with, is a Light Table. This tool assists artists and photographers with reviewing their work ensuring the highest quality only. A classical light table will show the artist the place on the images to touch up. Well in digiKam, the light table function provides the user a similar experience. You can import a photo, drag it onto the light table, and touch up only the areas that need it.

Note: it's not very stable if you insist on running it on Windoof. Very reliable on Linux, I haven't tried with OSX.

Features

Mind Memory

[war4peace]

About a week ago I was talking to a couple people who had a very interesting startup. They were working on an application which would "gamify" your media collection (images and videos) and let you play a game where you would identify and sort your digital memories.

I don't know where do they sit on this, maybe it was at concept stage, maybe it was more advanced, I didn't ask. But I'll ask and let you know. Sounded like a pretty neat concept, though, and I'd definitely buy such a game which would turn what's otherwise perceived as a chore into something useful and enjoyable.

Content Management Systems

[thechemic]

Drupal with something like the Node Gallery module would allow you to easily upload entire galleries, tag them all, quickly search through them, and even allow you to share them with the world with authentication if you choose.

Use Windows Explorer

[Holistic Missile]

If you are tagging jpeg files, just use Windows explorer.

Right-click on the file, and select 'Details'. The EXIF tags are shown and can be edited here. Title, subject, rating, tags, comments, etc.

You can ctrl-select multiple files and edit the data that will be the same on all of them at once. For example, select all 50 photos from your vacation, and give them the subject 'Vacation 2014'. These tags are part of each file, and are indexed and searchable on Windows and OSX. I haven't tried it on Linux or FreeBSD yet, but I would imagine one of the various desktops' search functions will search (and index?) the tags.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[Holistic Missile]

Sorry - right-click -> Properties -> 'Details' tab :-)

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Just tried this. To me this is a hands-down winner.

The meta-data is stored in the .jpg so does not rely on some fragile external meta-data file and the ease of use is there too.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[Holistic Missile]

The beauty of using the integrated metadata is that you can organize the photos by creating search folders, or just doing searches. A search folder searching for 'Vacation' will always have all of your vacation files in it, and will automatically include new photos with 'vacation' in the tags. You can then narrow down by year, location, or whatever else you've included in your files.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[Harlequin80]

But SOOOOO slow and painful to do it this way! You will be tagging to the end of time with a right click multi menu approach.

Use something like image tagger or one of the other dedicated applications which allows you to add data to the exif tags without the pain of using explorer.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[matbury]

I also recommend editing the EXIF data on the files themselves. it's the only platform-independent way I've found so far. I do the same with MP3 files.

BTW, Windows Media Player is a pretty good photo organiser and it makes editing EXIF data individually and in bulk easier. After that, you use Shotwell in Linux or some more photo-friendly app to browse them.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I just loaded up Image Tagger. It asks me for the EXIFTOOL on startup and wants me to browse folders for one and did not see any Windows shell integration.

It might be great once setup, but I'll never be spending that hour to figure it out because I would spend that hour trying to find a more user-friendly tool.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[Harlequin80]

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/...

exiftool is an opensource perl library. You can do everything Image Tagger does on the command line with exiftool. Image tagger however does all the hard work of building the commands for you.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I fully believe it is a powerful tool and useful tool. But I wouldn't be able to say to someone in my family "hey you should use this". They would never figure it out.

I do appreciate the information you provided and maybe I will end up personally using it to tag my photos, because I do agree that 3 or 4 clicks on every file is certainly a waste of time.

Re:Use Windows Explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn on Details pane in the Explorer.
The procedure then becomes Select files -> edit tags in the corresponding field

pornview

[Anonymous Coward]

pornview

Re:pornview

[sycodon]

Yep. Why make up all this crap about family and vacations and shit??

Everyone knows it's for a porn collection. Hell, I face the same dilemma. How do you automatically detect and delete duplicate images?

Re:pornview

[drkim]

...How do you automatically detect and delete duplicate images?

This:
http://doublekiller.en.softoni...

Re:pornview

[davester666]

who the fuck is still collecting nude images, other than pedophiles and people who use 4chan to manage their archive?

Re: pornview

[Anonymous Coward]

People who travel to countries where porn sites are blocked/internet connections are spotty or slow. I have around 1000 images and 50-100 videos just in case. What's the harm in having them, since I'm nowhere near filling up my 500 GB hard drive anyway? And the girlfriend is not tech savy, so she has no idea how to show hidden files, so she won't find them, and neither will any casual guest (I use linux anyway, so I basically just show them how to browse the web and that's all they touch).

Re:pornview

[djrosen]

http://antidupl.sourceforge.ne...
Works great Requires Windows and .NET

Re:pornview

[Anonymous Coward]

VisiPics

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/visipics.html

I like Picassa

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You organize the photos and folders any way you like. It does not modify any original photo or image file. Instead it scans the folders for new files, builds indexes such that you can view the photos either by folders, or by albums or by tagged faces etc. You can add captions to photos, and folders, search based on wild cards and then create an album out of search results. Has some other features like making collages out of selection, keeping a few albums synched with on line sharing, making slide show movies etc.

Re:I like Picassa

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cool. You know what I like? Fucking your mom in the ass.

Don't need photo-organizing softare

[myid]

You don't have to use software that was written for organizing photos. First figure out the attributes that you care about (ex: year, location, occasion). Then:

Put the file names and attribute information into a spreadsheet. One row per photo. First column for the file name, then one column per attribute (year, etc.). Then you can search, sort and filter the spreadsheet, to find certain kinds of photos. If there are too many photos for one spreadsheet, split them up into several spreadsheets. (Ex: one spreadsheet each, for photos of your parents' childhood, from when you lived in New York, etc.)

-or-

Create folders named "parents childhood", "lived in New York", "Susan's high school graduation.", etc. Then for each photo about when you lived in New York, put a Unix link or a Windows shortcut file of that photo in the "lived in New York" folder. For each photo of Susan's high school graduation, put a link or shortcut into the "Susan's high school graduation" folder. (Of course, you might put links or shortcuts of the same photo into multiple folders.)

Re:Don't need photo-organizing softare

[Anonymous Coward]

This is totally not cross platform and lacks seriously flexibility. By using EXIF-fields in the image files you remedy both.

CompuShow 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

All day every day. Very useful in converting these useless GIF and PNG files into something more sensible like BMP!!!

Ecch

[Enry]

It's pretty bad out there for organization and storage. I tried using just flat directories by date as others mentioned but then it became difficult to find things when you didn't know when the event happened. Then I went with Gallery, but it got comment spammed. Then I went with Gallery 2, but that POS is a total disaster, enough that the entire project seems to be shut down.

I'm using smugmug now. Easy to upload and download, they have a fairly open API for writing your own interface, and you can easily change protection on items you upload so they're public, private, or public if you know the URL. Costs a bit of money but integrates with my EyeFi cards nicely so I don't have to worry about uploading photos at the end of the day.

Aperture

[hcs_$reboot]

Aperture (yes it's on an Apple Mac) is the best thing I ever tried to organize / rate / tag index / enhance etc... pictures.

Re:Aperture

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Aperture for several years. It's a very nice application. However, Apple killed it, so I wouldn't start using it.
http://www.informationweek.com...

I switch to digikam at the beginning of this year. Its been working great.

Re:Aperture

[Anonymous Coward]

After Yosemite, Apple is abandoning Aperture, so good luck. I have Aperture too and love the interface, so I'm sad it's being abandoned. They never did keep up with Lightroom in terms of image quality and features though.

Photomechanic

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a professional photographer, that has a background in CS.. I shoot about 3TB of photos a year. All Raw or Videos (.mov)... I use Camerabits Photomechanic to ingest, rename files based on time/date/frame number. It stores in folders automatically created in date plus custom desc format, and it adds caption info into metadata while copying to 2 (redundant) drive spaces.. Photomechanic also has the fastest raw processor i have seen.. I then use Lightroom/Photoshop to image and process..

Low Level Works Best!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your desire to keep from being locked into proprietary software forever really will help with the longevity of your data. The simplest, most lower level solution will win as long as it's easy enough to use. I wrote a script that I use with Nautilus that tags files. Basically individual files get a unique UUID. Tags work by creating hard links of the file which have different names. For example, a file will be named as UUID.tag.file_extension. The UUID stays the same for each individual file, but my tag is in the file name. This is nice because it is human readable, and if my data gets separated from my software, I still have something to work with. The hard links are part of the file system and don't take up much extra space, plus it makes it easy to edit a file from any hard link. The process is easy enough to rewrite in most any language if I need to in 20 years.

Re: Low Level Works Best!

[Anonymous Coward]

I should also note that the script has a GUI, so it is easy to use, along with the ability to change the mod time to post date scanned documents. The search/filter script to find the tags is a separate process but equally simple. Heck I've gotten my wife to use it, so that is a success in my book!

Sharepoint

[pastafazou]

metadata, tags, keywords, content types, and more.

Folders first, then tags

[Anonymous Coward]

I create a separate folder for each camera, then subfolders by year, and in those more subfolders by month. The cameras are set up to create a folder by date which get dropped into the correct folder above. Tag the photos and you can use pretty much any photo software to find them, I just use Shotwell in Linux. This is the best way to do the file organization I've found in 10+ years. It's easy to find whatever, especially when archived.

Wrote My Own

[Bigbutt]

Tagging, Tag cloud, organizing by event, upload capable from portable devices as well as computers. Written on a LAMP system (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). I have a special tag to identify pictures I want to rotate through the main page. It's still not quite where I want it to be but my stuff generally is a work in progress.

Write it yourself. You'll learn quite a lot and invest time into your photos :)

[John]

Upload to an internet archive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Set it up so the public can tag and index them for you.

If it's important, they'll do it. If nobody cares, nobody should care, least of all you.

Facebook

[aaronb1138]

Privacy, copyright, resolution, and control issues aside, it seems like Facebook currently has the best software for collecting, cataloging, and tagging images. The facial recognition in Facebook is even excellent, automatically suggesting to tag friends accurately in poorly lit, blurry shots. The timeline, album, and geographical features are great, with the biggest weakness is usually bandwidth to sync a large bulk of photos in one go.

I am certainly not suggesting he use Facebook, quite the opposite. I'm saying that commercial standalone software should try to be as good and easy to use as Facebook and similar like Google+.

piwigo

[Anonymous Coward]

apache + mysql + php => http://www.piwigo.org/
I run it on my home server. Easy to install and easy to manage.

Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what you want as per Google, but Google Plus makes the searching of all of my many, many hundreds of GiB of photos exceptionally easy, by date, by inferred location. I search for `beach' and get pictures of...wait for it...beaches and my kids on the beach. Full EXIF searching, geolocation, dates, etc etc.

year-month-event structure and then picasa

[solsang]

1) First, to avoid total chaos, make a strict year-month-event structure of all photos and use name of place if no event!... 2) Picasa is the ONLY program that automatically lists all photos without any import/export and database, and all tags you add in Picasa are stored on the photos, edits are stored too if you press the blue save icon, which copies the originals to a (hidden) subfolder. Picasa also has a great face recognition engine, in preferences you must turn "save nametags to photo" for this to make sense!... 1b) Optionally, after sorting into event folders, you can do yourself a real favour by auto-renaming all your photos; I use Hazel for mac to give my photos the name 'event+month+date+year+time+iso+cameraname+filename' (from foldername and exif), then i can search for any event/place, know if it is likely to be noisy (high iso) and avoid duplicate finder programs or people accidentally deleting photos with the same name... The renaming program should look into subfolders so all your files can be renamed at once, after setting it up and testing:)

Image file metadata fields

[Anonymous Coward]

I think organizing files on the filesystem using good folder names and hierarchies as well as good filenames is best. To record further details such as names of people in the picture, edit the metadata of the image file itself. Maybe there is a metadata field to store ranking/stars too.

+1 Lightroom

[careysb]

+1 for Lightroom. I manage over 50,000 photos taken over the last 17 years and I can find images very quickly. I think a task like this would be difficult without a database backed approach but that, of course, comes with trade-offs. Of course LR can write out any meta-data changes to the image files or an XMP file. I used to be an Adobe fanboi but with their new subscription model, not so much. I still think LR is the best tool out there.

camlistore

[Utna]

Though it's newer and under development, this might be something to keep an eye on:

https://camlistore.org/

Tags on OS X

[Smurf]

I am aware that the original poster wants to use Linux and may be talked into using Windows but probably not into buying a Mac. But since other people will have the same question and some of them may be Mac users, here it goes:

Many responders have already suggested creating ingenious folder structures that will help you keep a basic level of organization to the photo collection. Use any of those systems, and augment it by making use of OS X's extremely useful tagging feature.

Furthermore, there are many applications, such as the ones made by Ironic Software, that allow you to search, organize, and work with your files in very powerful ways using those tags. Since the tagging system is common to all of them you are not tied to any particular application.

The only downside of this is that you do become dependent on OS X at least until other systems implement tagging.

This is why I still have a Windows PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Macs primarily and NetBSD for server stuff. But I still have a Windows PC. Because my photo collection - huge, tagged, rated, organized, and selectively uploaded - is managed via Windows (Live) Photo Gallery and there isn't a better option on any OS, at any price. (I think Aperture might have been good, but it's 4 getting stale and doesn't play nice with the filesystem like WLPG does.) It's free to try, and has just a little bit of a learning curve, and then it just works. (And all the metadata is stored in the files themselves.)

Legacy labeler

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a site called legacy labeller (legacy-labeler.com) that embeds tags into exif and also modifies the image to label them. This will be useful in a generation or two when nobody alive remembers who the people in the picture are.

I think it only runs on one image at a time right now.

The site author mentioned that he'd be willing to open source the site code if there was enough interest. He claims the code works find got batch processing too on Linux or BSD machines.

Install your own image tag board

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a project I'm working on for my mom after her dog died and she really wants to be able to view all her images. In a way I'm surprised more people haven't tried to push tag (semantic) solutions, and that so many are happy with a hierarchical system on their file system.

First, this guy does a decent stuff to say about extended attributes for files, and why you might want to use them.

He does talk about using this for general files which would be really cool, but not really help with my current problem. Since I need this shareable with my mom and whoever she wants to share it with.

http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/pages/tagfs.html
http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/pages/extattrs.html

There are a few sites that I know of that do a decent job with a tagging approach. BTW, NSFW. Its a popular image site on the net, ya they have a lot of porn in there.

Wikipedia talks a bit about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Danbooru-style_boards

The board styles I was most interested in:

http://danbooru.donmai.us/
http://gelbooru.com/
https://yande.re/post

danbooru is powered by danbooru
https://github.com/r888888888/danbooru

Yande.re is powered by moebooru which is a danbooru fork
https://github.com/moebooru/moebooru

Gelbooru is powered by gelbooru
http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=forum&s=view&id=99

I like moebooru more right now.

I'm going to get a server up and going with danbooru and moebooru to look more closely at the system and its admin options, Gelbooru doesn't interest me much because its source for 0.1 was released.. but otherwise its mostly hidden..

All these systems use SQL so the data can be copied off and worked over.

Yes this will take a lot more effort, and I'm stumbling now because I'm having to get a solid understanding of systems administrations to get this going securely and in a trustworthy manner... but really whats the other option? Without this deeper systems knowledge I'm at the whims of whatever easy web based crap someone thinks they can easily sell to a large number of stupid people who are happy with just hitting an "easy" button once.

Google Picasa 3

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

The dudes suggesting something else (python? databases? file system? really?) have no clue. Ignore them.

Picase 3, or some similar ones (they don't differ that much). If you want "industry standard" you are going to have to switch to windows and lighroom.

+1 Picasa

Google Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Bonus is we will get to search your photos aswell at some point!

Fileaxy FOSS project on google-code & SourceFo

[Anonymous Coward]

Uses the directory naming conventions described by previous posters, cross platform for Mac, Windows, Linux (though Debian doesn't have openjdk8 yet and requires oracle d/l) project I've put 20 months in on https://sourceforge.net/projects/fileaxy/

I made my own

[Carl Drougge]

I made my own image tagging software, which is likely to be supported (for me, by me) as long as I care. It's probably not the right choice for most people. Anyone who wants to use mine is free to do so, but it's not well packaged. Undoubtedly missing features some people consider mandatory. It also makes some unconventional choices.

If anyone wants to try it I will answer email about it, and we can arrange to meet on IRC. There are several mode repos on the same github account (that are part of the same system).

Basic ideas:

Client/server model. Server in C, client in python.

Everything you do it kept forever. The only persistant metadata storage is a log of everything you've done.

Image files are never ever touched. They are identified by their hash. Anything messing with them will break this.

There's a fuse filesystem for searches, which you can use with whatever viewer you like. There's also a (crappy) web interface.

You can import raw files and see jpegs in the fuse fs/web client. (The embedded jpeg found in nearly all raw files.)

Shotwell

[ssam]

Shotwell https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Sh... is very nice for browsing/tagging. I just wish it had a more advanced raw editing mode like RawTherapee or Darktable.

For Linux, Corel AfterShot Pro (was Bibble)

[HiGuys]

AfterShot Pro, while not open source, is cross platform and very good indeed. It lets you manage your library quite effectively through tagging, and gives you non-destructive RAW editing so that you can create multiple versions of each file (that are subsequently grouped together). Browsing is also very easy and quick.

It's been a while since I had a look at the open source equivalents, but I remember thinking that, even on a teacher's salary, it was worth the extra few dollars (I was Linux-only at the time). Lock-in is another thing, of course.

That all said, I moved to iPhoto + Photoshop in the end.

kphotoalbum is the best in my opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used kphotoalbum to organise my collection of over 100,000 photos.
It is free and open source, simple to use and well supported.

For more info just check out there website or install it, it is already in most linux software repositories.
www.kphotoalbum.org

Re:kphotoalbum is the best in my opinion

[As_I_Please]

I second this. KPhotoAlbum was specifically made for fast tagging. Tagging 1,000 images with places, people, interesting things, etc., in half an hour is pretty normal for a session. As for lock-in, your image tags are kept in an all-text XML file. I run it off of Gnome and XFCE and don't notice any problems.

Re:Good tool for Exif and IPTC and search

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll second the recommendation for PhotoMechanic. While not open source is does write metadata into the photos such that any other program / os can read it.
Well at least I haven't found a photo program / OS that won't read the meta data.that it writes.(Im on Mac BTW). I often share photos with others and I've never had an issue where those other folks couldn't read the metadata,
I use it to on all new images to delete the stinkers, add geo tags, add keywords and captions etc. before I add them to Aperture and iPhoto (I add them by reference so the image stays as a regular file in the os . I store the images in the file system using a simple data based folder structure Year/Month/Day/
I have about 20k photo in those directories.
I can use PhotoMechanic to search any of the meta data in all of those files, and it does it pretty quickly. So if I want to find all the images of Uncle Mike or all images taken with a particular camera you can have PhotoMechanic search through all the images and create a list of the matching images. If I search on all photos results come back in about 2 or 3 minutes. Not bad at all for software that doesn't have a database behind it.

Gary

TMSU

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tmsu.org/

I would use Piwigo

[Anonymous Coward]

http://piwigo.org/

ImageMagick and raw images (Re:Image Organization)

[mi]

Just took a look at Imagemagick; they've definitely come a long way in RAW support.

ImageMagick (at least, the versions I've used so far) would spawn off ufraw (ufraw-batch rather) to turn raw-images into a bitmap that it can process itself.

Thus, the formats supported are determined by UFRaw...Which, I might add, has a decent GUI of its own, which can be used to correct the mistakes made when photographing (there is usually enough information in the raw file to allow moving up or down 2 shutter-stops, for example)...

Web-interface

[mi]

I am facing the same problem and plan to use a web-application (such as gallery). Not out of exhibitionism, but to allow the older relatives to help with tagging, sorting, commenting, and rating the images — while themselves enjoying the pictures of their descendants doing fun things.

I will block anonymous access to the collection by default, but will still be able to open it for the particular images I may choose to share.

Gallery in particular can "import" the existing photos on the hosting computer in bulk — you don't need to upload them via browser one at a time.

Windows only, but IMatch is great

[sanschag]

For pure organization, I found IMatch to be absolutely great. While I did switch to Lightroom last year to take advantage of the raw processing workflow, I found the management aspect of IMatch to be much better. (I had used it for 5+ years before the switch.) While it is Windows only and does use a proprietary database in the back, it's quite straightforward to export categories (basically hierarchical keywords) and custom properties into IPTC metadata. There's also a Visual Basic-based scripting engine allowing plugins, either written yourself or from other users.

Has Anyone Tried Mylio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fairly new cross-platform app.

I don't have an opinion on the app (I'm not a shill). It could suck.

However, it could also be very, very good.

simple and effective: referencer

[davek]

I use a little program called Referencer to manage images of bills and checks. I spent a /lot/ of time looking for a simple program where I can organize a stack of images (or PDFs) by applying 1 or more tags to each. THAT'S ALL. Referencer is made for generating bibliographies for TeX documents, but it is STILL the only simple program I know of that can manage a database of files and tags.

If anyone knows of a better one, PLEASE let me know. I have a feeling the app will soon be orphaned.

Everything on Wine

[Immerman]

Well, will you look at that.

I just forlornly tried running Everything in Wine, and apparently they've added non-NTFS support!, because while it doesn't index anything by default, once I point it at the various folders I want to make searchable it works beautifully, even with folders on my ext4 partition. Updating the index is slower and I suspect I'll need to switch to periodic index updates instead of automatic change detection, but search works just as instantly as it should, readily accessible from it's notification-area icon.

I would still prefer a comparably powerful native solution, if only to avoid having to constantly deal with that disconcerting WINE filesystem translation. But it's not *that* bad, so if you'll excuse me I'm going to go do a happy dance and laglessly scroll through the list of 133,000 indexed files a couple more times.

Re:Everything on Wine

[Wycliffe]

I tend to use updatedb/locate on the command line. It's fast but it's not search as you type.
I wouldn't be surprised though if there is a front-end for locate that does search as you type.
Finding a good front-end gui for locate would probably be your best bet in finding a native solution.

Use good folder names

[Control-Z]

Personally I maintain my own directory structure and use an OLD version of ThumbsPlus to view the photos. It is also good for things like batch converting and rotation.

I have an Incoming folder for unsorted-direct-from-camera photos, then when I sort them out I make folders with a naming scheme like this:

YYYYMMDD - Hiking on Blue Ridge Parkway

I also make a folder for miscellaneous pictures for each year named YYYY0000 - Miscellaneous.

Tags on Linux also (at least in KDE apps)

[Smurf]

Update: I just learned that there is indeed a way to tag files in Linux (well, in KDE apps at least). In its current incarnation it is called Baloo, and it is now implemented pretty much like tags are implemented in OS X, that is by incorporating the tags in an extended attribute for the file.

Unfortunately when I google "baloo kde" I do see quite a bit of pages asking or showing how to disable Baloo. I guess it's still in its infancy and still suffers from performance issues. (Baloo actually does much more than tagging, it is the whole file indexing system, so it is more akin to Spotlight on the Mac side.)

forever.com

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.forever.com

Expensive but guaranteed storage and access of your digital images for 100 years. Future maintenance cost is service through an investment fund.

You can try vvvP

[fu-ku-jitsu]

vvvP is open source and it works under Linux, Mac and Windows. You can even share your catalog from a network server. It catalogs images and it stores thumbnails, you can add descriptions and create a hierarchy of virtual folders to organize the images. It supports RAW images. http://vvvp.sourceforge.net/

Simplest is best

[Anonymous Coward]

add bash and exiftool to the mix.

BINGO just use folders

[Barryke]

This is THE correct answer.
Just use folders that contain a date and name.
It sorts, its searchable, and whatever software you prefer can build upon this and store tags/metadata.

Just make sure you dont use evil software that tries to lock your files into its own archive format. Ideally you'll want it to store its meta-files besides the original files in the same folder.

I have no software suggestions, i dont have a favorite software for this, i keep no metadata or tags outside the photo files, and use whatever editor/viewer comes handy.

Re:BINGO just use folders

[Barryke]

Note the YYYYMMDD date format. Its like magic. ISO 8601