Does cross-platform, self-contained photo management exist?

February 24, 2009 2:27 PM

I'm a single user looking for an easier way to browse my photos. It looks like I need a photo management tool like iPhoto, F-Spot, et al. The catch: if possible, I would like whatever solution I end up with to be cross-platform and self-contained (because I'm scared of entering all of my information into a proprietary database that I can't get my data out of later).

Unfortunately, I seem to have outgrown using folders to organize my photos. I'm looking to organize on the order of thousands of photos, but I probably don't need the sort of workflow tools that a real professional photojournalist/photographer would need. I'd really like something that can show thumbnails of various sizes, let me browse fluidly by date, and has some basic tagging and set functionality, but I probably don't need much more than that.

My big requirement is that I'd like this thing to make use of EXIF or similar in order to avoid having some database that I can never get my data out of again. Ideally, I would like it to be cross-platform, though if it's not, that's not a huge problem. I'm using Ubuntu Linux, though I'm also curious if there is something that uses EXIF for organization on another platform.

Photo management questions seem fairly common on AskMeFi, e.g., photo management over a shared network, digital photo storage management, and so on, but I didn't see anything that answered this particular question.

Is there any decent photo management software that doesn't tie you into a proprietary database / data format that you can't get away from or export later?

posted by pbh to technology (10 comments total)

What you need to look for is a tool that stores all its data in EXIF/IPTC/XMP metadata in the pictures themselves. Most modern tools do that although they also redundantly store that data in a database as well for quick retrieval. I'm afraid the separate database structure is unavoidable because queries against tens of thousands of files would be too slow otherwise. As far as making this seperate database be cross platform or cross tool, I am unaware of any such tool. Even Picasa for Linux isn't going to magically work with the database of the windows version for example.

Some additional caveats for you as you evaluate things. Make sure you know what happens to metadata for formats that don't natively support captions/tags/etc. Most of the time this is in some sort of sidecar format (i.e. a separate metadata file per piece of content). That is suboptimal at best.

Lastly, EXIF is camera metadata (exposure, f-stop, camera name, date, time); IPTC is human metadata (captions, keywords, abstracts, etc.); XMP is more modern implementation of human metadata. IPTC was developed by news gatherers and photographers back in the day whereas XMP was designed by the image manipulation companies (Adobe et al). Although there are standards in this space keep in mind that not every product implements the spec 100%.
posted by mmascolino at 2:46 PM on February 24

What kind of management do you need from your system?
If your metadata needs aren't too complex, you could use a flickr account to store them "in the cloud", and CoolIris from (almost) any browser, to view them.
posted by nomisxid at 3:01 PM on February 24

It's been ages since I've used it, but you might take a look at Photos, which is a web-based photo management system. I would guess that you could run it locally on Ubuntu. If not that, maybe check out other web-based systems.
posted by epersonae at 3:29 PM on February 24

mmascolino: "What you need to look for is a tool that stores all its data in EXIF/IPTC/XMP metadata in the pictures themselves. Most modern tools do that although they also redundantly store that data in a database as well for quick retrieval. I'm afraid the separate database structure is unavoidable because queries against tens of thousands of files would be too slow otherwise. As far as making this seperate database be cross platform or cross tool, I am unaware of any such tool. Even Picasa for Linux isn't going to magically work with the database of the windows version for example.

Thanks for the great comment. I'm not concerned about the database not needing to be regenerated so much as the data being re-importable easily (so that I can, e.g., just copy the directory structure to another computer and re-import, even if that takes a while), which leads me to three follow-up questions:

1. If my CR2/JPEGs have metadata attached in IPTC/XMP from one program, will another program be able to reimport and use it properly? In other words, if I give a photo a tag or keyword in one program, will I be able to browse using that tag or keyword in another or just view it attached to the photo? Another way of stating this is, do different photo management programs use IPTC/XMP in substantially different and incompatible ways to accomplish the same things?
2. Relatedly, you refer to some photo management programs implementing the XMP/IPTC standard better than others. Who's good? Who's bad? Is there one that you think is most useful while still respecting the standards to some reasonable degree?
3. Is there a good reference for understanding IPTC/XMP from a user perspective (admittedly a user who is also a developer at other times) rather than as someone who is implementing a program on top of one of the two standards?

posted by pbh at 3:38 PM on February 24

F-spot uses SQLite as its database engine (the link documents the schema).
posted by Electric Dragon at 3:59 PM on February 24

nomisxid: "What kind of management do you need from your system?
If your metadata needs aren't too complex, you could use a flickr account to store them "in the cloud", and CoolIris from (almost) any browser, to view them."

Nothing terribly complicated, I'm mostly looking for:

1. Fast viewing of (many) images that I can quickly full screen (so a local rather than web-based application is probably what I want).
2. Tags/keywords, and possibly sets, such that I can easily browse for images of a similar type (e.g., "flowers", "portraits" and "California Trip 2009").
3. Some sort of date view, ideally a chronological slider so I can browse by date.

These don't seem like really complex needs, I'm mostly just concerned about the metadata remaining intact if I want to switch programs later.

Flickr fulfills a few of these needs, but not really the real-time, chronological, or full screen ones (at least, not in a very user-friendly manner). Cooliris makes Flickr a little more like a desktop app (e.g., full screen, GL accelerated browsing, etc.), but I've mostly been using Flickr as a place to store a few photos rather than thousands. (Cooliris is Win/Mac only right now anyway.) On a side note (and at the risk of going off on a tangent), if there's a way to get Flickr to export your photos that have been previously tagged with appropriate XMP/IPTC, that would be pretty good, but they don't seem to be super-open about such exporting (as opposed to other things that they have open APIs for).
posted by pbh at 4:02 PM on February 24

Both iPhoto and Picasa use IPTC Core to store captions and tags and files from one drop into the other with tags intact. IPTC also has an extended set of data that I haven't seen well implemented in desktop apps. This data can be encoded with XMP. So after all that acronyming around, I think you can safely assume that programs that store tags in IPTC will easily import into others that do so as well. In fact, I was playing with the alpha version on Gallery3, a php based web photo manager and it read in the IPTC tags and used them perfectly.
posted by advicepig at 4:17 PM on February 24

The casual applications for this (iPhoto, Picasa) probably aren't going to meet your needs for portability. I surveyed a bunch of different Digital Asset Management (DAM) programs for personal use about a year or so ago. (A side note, I highly recommend The DAM Book, its a little outdated in terms of software, but the principles still apply. Also the forum there has a lot to say about different DAM programs.) The three most interesting are as follows:

Adobe Bridge
Pros: Everything stored in metadata (except collections, stacks), filter panel, if you export cache to folder everything is portable, integrated with photoshop and camera raw, sets, collections.
Cons: Slow to build cache initially. Slower to browse than a DB driven program. Requires purchase of Photoshop (but hey, you have photoshop too then).

Microsoft Expression Media (formerly iViewMediaPro)
Pros: DB Driven but allows writing everything except Collections to metadata (Sync annotations), allows thumbnails of different sizes, very fast browsing, Custom collections, works on OS X and Windows.
Cons: To export collections to another program requires some hackery (add keyword such as CollectionA, then in new program select all with it and create collection, then remove keyword), requires Sync Annotations to write keywords, takes some time to import files/build thumbnails. Expensive, unless you are a student and can get it free through Microsoft Dreamspark.

IdImager
Pros: Most full featured. Create collections based on rules, not just manually. DB driven but also allows write to files. Free version.
Cons: Requires running SQLExpress locally. A bit slow at times. So fully featured that it takes a deal of time to learn.

This is just what I remember of the top of my head. All of these programs benefit from having read the manuals. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
posted by miscbuff at 6:07 PM on February 24

Thanks for all the help everyone! I'll read up more on XMP and IPTC, and probably check out the DAM book (the website is certainly informative).
posted by pbh at 1:08 AM on February 25

As for some seem to support it better than others, I don't have a comprehensive view of the marketplace but I do see it from a programmer's library point of view. A lot of them are incomplete or behave slightly differently. If this is important or not for your use cases is unknown. One simple case that I have noticed when poking around pictures tagged with Picasa on Windows vs. MS' Image Powertoy with some python programs I wrote is that the Picasa's tags show with a null terminated byte for each of the tags. So who is right and who is wrong here? I've never found the spec so I can't say for certain.

What I would recommend is trying out some of the tools and play with the metadata entry in each one and move the pictures over to other ones and see what kind of fidelity you get. Hopefully everything works well and you can pick the tool that helps you enter metadata the easiest. I say that as someone who is about 13,000 photos into a 15,000 photo tagging project.
posted by mmascolino at 7:47 PM on February 25