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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.
mkdir, find.
an ill wind that blows no good
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.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Google Picasa 3 , I find this has a little bit of everything i need except duplicate file management.
Just post them all on "Hot or not"
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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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
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.
On a side note : IMO, You should have started indexing your kids at 0...
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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
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
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.
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.
Print them all and put them in labelled shoeboxes.
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:-
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
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.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
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.
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
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.
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.)
metadata, tags, keywords, content types, and more.
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?
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
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.
short answer: yes, it does.
source: I process my brother's 5D cards.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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 ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
...but it saves on random number generator cycles...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://antidupl.sourceforge.ne... .NET
Works great Requires Windows and