Now that we're back from Europe I want to start putting notes with the pictures that I have taken and put together album(s). I used JAlbum before and was impressed with it, but it has drawbacks.
1) if I am going to go through the trouble of adding descriptions to the images, I want that info stored with the file itself as metadata and not in some properties file.
2) Pictures that I take all have the date / time that they were taken encoded with them already. I don't want to have to organize things myself manually. I want it to build pages blog style with the pictures sorted by date / time divided up by days with a calender between them. What I think would be great if you could say "create new album between this date and that date, use only files with location of Paris" and it would make that album using the descriptions you already labelled the files with...
So far with my research I can't seem to find any tool that will help me out yet. I maybe able to make a skin for JAlbum that will serve my purposes though...
First off I need an easy (and free if possible) way of tagging all my info. So far what I have read is to use Adobe Photoshop Album but I don't really feel like shelling out 70-120 $ at this time. I thought that maybe WinXP would have something built in but this is not so since they tell you to make an elaborate folder structure to organize things. *sigh* It always seems to come down that the hard problems for people now are managing large collections of digital media.
Any suggestions?
Update:
I found some after searching for "photo management". Article
Picasa
Flickr
For my photos I recently started using Coppermine. It was a little app that came with my hosting. Installed all for me. I like it and find it to be pretty good. You can do batch uploads, so it might be a good idea if you are doing a lot of pictures. Anyway, you can check out my album here. Not too many pictures, but that should give you the jist of what you get.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.kibbee.ca/Coppermine/
From the coppermine site "picture information stored in database".
ReplyDeleteOne of my main requirements that the info that I put with a file stays with the file -> metadata. If I decided later to switch apps I don't want to spend months cutting and pasting to transfer the info. I just want the new app to generate a photo album based on the files... It can cache the info in a db or wherever, I don't care, but I don't want that as the primary storage of info.
Rogers Yahoo has a photo album thing that I am already using which seems similar to coppermine.
I didn't really pay attention to the details of your post (I think you mentioned metadata at some point) but I personally like picasa.
ReplyDeleteI agree, the metadata should stay with the picture. JPEG formats support some metadata -- and Picasa lets you access it, but i'm not sure about bulk tagging. Let us know what you come up with. :)
ReplyDeleteThe problem with storing data in the files, is that if you want the data to be useful, the program will have to mirror that data in some sort of database. Keeping all this data synchronized can be a pain. Also, not all file formats keep metadata, and not all file formats keep the same metadata. You could just put everything in JPEG, but It is my opinion that JPEG sucks. I can't believe there are so many cameras out there that use JPEG as default. With flash memory becoming so cheap, it's amazing that we even still use lossy compression.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm getting off topic. If you are storing data about what's in the picture, then you have to have a copy for the picture, the smaller picture, the thumbnail picture, and a copy in the database. That's 4 copies of the same data. Provided that the data is accessible (coppermine uses a mysql database), it's much easier to get at the data then if it was stored in the file to begin with. Plus you can store the same data for all the files. You don't have to worry about which file format supports what kind of metadata.
Welcome back Jim!
ReplyDeleteJon has a copy of Adobe Photoshop Album if you would like him to make you a copy! He loves it for our pictures!
Just let me know and drop me an email!