Flexible Photo Organization Software?

Matthew Wecksell asks: "Several years after getting a digital camera, I find myself with far too many pictures to keep track of, with multiple folders titled 'At the Beach' and so on. Picassa will not let me assign multiple labels to a picture and then search against those labels the way iTunes will with my music (eg: Show me all pictures with '"Grandma Foo" and not "Grandma Bar"' to find pics that have just one of my two grandmothers). Also, I'd like to find a solution that lets me export the meta data or keep it in the picture files, not a proprietary database, so that in ten or twenty years, I can use another program on another platform and still have useful tags assigned to my pictures that I'm taking today — I have no interest in re-tagging my pics. Has anyone found a good solution to the picture organization problem? Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?"

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Photoshop Elements

[BenjyD]

I believe that Photoshop Elements 4 stores the tag data in the photo headers. In general, PSE4 on Windows is a really good photo organiser, I prefer it to iPhoto in fact.

Hmm.

[BJH]

Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?

Why, yes, and they're described in section 4.6 of the EXIF specification [exif.org].

Aperture or Lightroom

[SuperKendall]

If you were using a Mac, I'd suggest Aperture...

But since you mentioned Picassa, I'll assume you are using Windows. You may want to look at Lightroom, you can organize photos and attach keywords which you can then search on. Lightroom will generate XMP files alongside images, which hold all your metadata (Aperture can do the same). Lightroom also stores these keywords inside a local database, making search very fast.

Re:"me too"

[Viraptor]

No idea what system are you using, but if it's Linux, then try F-Spot (http://f-spot.org/Main_Page). It's basically Picasa, but:

• uses labels (normal text ones) AND tags with tag hierarchy, so you can tag it with "My room" and it will also get parent tags "Home", "My city", "My country" and "Place". Any number of tags allowed, along with complex searches (("Grandma foo" OR "Grandma bar") AND EXCLUDE "My room" is possible)
• has less "effects", but
• has more sliders in color / contrast correction + histogram
• supports camera and folder import

And yes - it has Picasaweb export!
Additionally it's a new project and is actively developed. Tags are kept in database, so network sharing will probably work with good configuration. Changes are kept like in Picasa - it always keeps the original file without modifications.

IMatch

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately is windows only, but is full of features.
It has the possibility of multiple categories assignment and the categories can be organized in hierarchical mode. You can even assign keywords. Categories and keywords (with all the file metadata) can be used for searching images, for example you can do the search you cite but you can put even restrinction on file size, resolution and others attribute.
It has two ways of decoupling the db data from the program : the first is using IPTC (it can export categories and keyword to IPTC), the second is using a XML export function wich will export all the db info in a documented XML format.
It has even batch processing and a scripting engine (in Real Basic) wich can access all the program classes. ( http://photools.com/ [photools.com] )

DigiKam

[ajs318]

I used to use a simple script to I wrote to create an index.html page from a directory of photos. This worked surprisingly well; but then I discovered digikam [digikam.org], and now I wouldn't look back.

IPTC metadata is what you want

[pauljlucas]

Is there any standard 'ID3' style for putting metadata into an EXIF header?

IPTC allows lots of metadata, e.g., caption, category, city, headline, keywords, etc. Google for it. Note that IPTC has nothing to do with EXIF. For JPEG files, IPTC metadata is stored in the segment having the APPD marker.

KPhotoAlbum

[swillden]

I don't know what platform you're on, but if you're on a Unix system, I *highly* recommend KPhotoAlbum (previously called KimDaBa).

Some of its features:

• All metadata is stored in an XML file, though optional SQL database support is nearly complete. Even after the SQL backend is done, you'll have a choice of using either SQL or XML. Either one gives you great data portability. The SQL backend ultimately promises multi-user access, and I'm working on a database synchronization tool, so that I can have an SQLite DB on my laptop and a MySQL DB on my home file server and automatically keep them in sync, allowing changes to be made in either place (my wife will probably always use the MySQL DB).
• Tagging is very flexible. Define any number of categories, any number of tags within categories, arbitrary hierarchical and cross-hierarchical organization of tags within categories, etc. Basically, there's no tagging structure you can't build with it.
• Tagging is very easy to do. The UI requires a little time to learn (though there are some videos to speed you through it), but that's because it's design is focused on making it possible to very efficiently categorize large numbers of photos, so there are a lot of hotkeys and tricks to learn. You can categorize photos just by pointing and clicking, but if you take a lot of pictures it's well worth it.
• "Token"-based tagging is a big help, too. While viewing images you can quickly associate single-letter "tokens" with each one, then mass apply real tags to the images. I use this for tagging images with people.
• It has a cool "date bar" that shows you a histogram of images over time, and allows you to quickly narrow your image searching and viewing by clicking and dragging over the date ranges.
• You can search for images either with sophisticated query strings, or by "drilling down" through the categories. For example, if I want to see a picture of my daughter on our 2005 trip to Florida, I just click "Location", click "Florida" (perhaps typing "f" in the search field to narrow the list so I don't have to scroll to find it), click "Persons", click my daughter's name (again perhaps first narrowing the list), then drag across the 2005-ish region of the date bar. At each stage KPA shows me the number of photos that match my restrictions so far. When it's small enough, I click "View Images" and I see thumbnails of the selected set. Very fast and intuitive. There's also a query language if you prefer.
• KPA supports the KDE Image Plugins, so you get all of those features, and new ones are added from time to time. There are export plugins that integrate with various web galleries, image manipulation plugins, a slide show creator and lots more.
• Large databases work well. There are KPA users with well over 100,000 images, though you may need a little more RAM if you have that many photos. The SQL backend should make databases of arbitrary size perform well.
• KPA also supports tagging, viewing and management of video clips.

If you're going to try KPA, I highly recommend getting an SVN version, or waiting a few weeks for the next release. It's a very significant upgrade over the last release and it's been in feature freeze for a while so it's very solid.

One of the things the question asked about was embedding the tags in the images, and if there was a standard way to do that. There is, it's called IPTC, and KPA supports loading tags from IPTC data. It doesn't support writing tags to IPTC, for two reasons:

• First, KPA's tag metadata is much richer than what could be accomodated in IPTC, so anything put in IPTC fields would necessarily be a subset.
• Second, a core part of KPA's philosophy is that the indexed images should not be modified in any way, to avoid any chance of data corruption (note that there are KIPI plugins that violate that philosophy).

Note also that there are some tools out there that only store the metadata in IPTC

photolibrary

[ed_g2s]

I ran into this problem a few years ago, and so started work on my own project which I now use to keep my collection of 8500+ photos organised. Categories (tags/labels/...) are arranged in a tree, and are assigned to photos.
So have a look at http://photolibrary.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] (or http://sourceforge.net/projects/photolibrary [sourceforge.net])

link

[maxume]

The rdf stuff feels like overkill, but overall, lots of places and things to look at:

http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/09/photo. html#software [impressive.net]

Re:"me too"

[Clueless Nick]

and possibility of heirarchical albums structure.

It's already there. Update Picasa through the Help menu entry or download it directly from http://picasa.google.com/ [google.com]

-clueless

Re:Hmm.

[jmkaza]

Of course, actually reading section 4.6 shows that the only tags available are TIFF Attributes indicating such exciting information as the 'Subsampling ratio of Y to C', and the ever useful 'White point chromaticity'.
As far as convenient ID3 type info that you can do something with; no.

Re:I'm doing something like this

[swillden]

For one, I want to support video and audio as well as images. Pretty much every phone and digital camera now days takes short video clips at least, and I think they should be integrated in with photos nicely in an album.

KPhotoAlbum does that already, BTW.

F-Spot uses Mono

[solferino]

I've read good things about F-Spot too.

But for user awareness I'd like to point out that F-Spot is developed using Mono. You of course, can make your own decision about whether you are comfortable with this dependency.