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

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.

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

[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.

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

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