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?"

"me too"

[tom17]

I love the UI on Picassa, but I am finding that it has some shortcomings.

For example, I have all my pictures on one network share. On desktop PC "A" I arrange my pictures into albums using labels. on Desktop PC "B", you have to repeat this work. A central (or even just exportable) database of this would be hands.

Along with multiple labels

and possibility of heirarchical albums structure.

And thus, he said "iPhoto?"

[MBCook]

I use iPhoto and besides albums I can assign keywords to the pictures making it easy to search by keyword. If iPhoto is not enough then Aperature is supposed to provide even more so I assume it would have better organizational stuff too.

Of course, both require a Mac.

But I love iPhoto. All my photos have names, ratings, and a set a keywords with everything from file type to portrait/landscape, to camera model and lens (I, of course, had to set all these).

My method, but not using software.

[n1hilist]

I have a large collection of photos I've taken over about 6 years.

My method is probably not for everyone, but it's just a simple way of storing them.

I have a directory structure as follows:

photos/2006/0101-nakedlinuxchix0rz/*.jpg
photos/2006/0428-steveballmertakingitupthebummy/*. jpg
so bascially: photos///*.files

It's not software, but I prefer it because it's not dependant on a software package, and with grep or start -> find it's rather easy to locate my photos.

Just a thought, it probably sucks but it works for me.

Re:at least flickr gets them off of your drive

[Cecil]

Maybe I'm a control freak, but I don't feel comfortable trusting someone else to a) store my photos, b) keep my photos secure, c) store a tag index for all of those photos. I don't even trust them to do it safely *right now*, much less to have done it and still be doing it 10 or 20 years down the road.

Re:I'm doing something like this

[thinsoldier]

here' the thing with descript.ion files
If I were to move a dozen photos from one dir to another using explorer the descript.ion file in the other directory has none of the info about the files I just put there.
All that info is in the .ion file of the previous directory. If I copy that .ion file over to the new destination folder it overwrites the old one and now only those 12 recently moved photos will have metadata and the hundreds of other photos in that dir lose everything.

descript.ion files suck unless every app in the os capable of moving files keeps constant track of them.

I've been an acdsee user since version 4 and it just doesn't cut it for me. To manually 'tag' stuff (stored in its database or .ion) takes too many clicks and keys and to edit exif data takes even more.

Crazy Idea:
An new xml image filefomat .imx

[imx]
        [meta] ...meta data here ...
        [/meta]
        [binaryimagedata] ...jpg or whatever binary image data here...
        [/binaryimagedata]
[/imx]

there, it can wrap any common existing file format.