Photo Tagging Software
September 14, 2010 3:11 PM Subscribe
Easy to use Photo Tagging Software that writes to XMP tags - no database - does it exist?
I am looking for software that will quickly tag a screenful of thumb nails, hopefully using drag and drop and then write the tags permanently to jpg files (XMP is the format that seems to be the most open and universal). I used a program a few years ago called Picajet but it was somewhat buggy and hasn't had much development recently. I want to be able to tag the photos and then be able to view or deal with them in other programs without being stuck with some proprietary database. Anyone have any suggestions? or reasons why my request is misguided?
I am looking for software that will quickly tag a screenful of thumb nails, hopefully using drag and drop and then write the tags permanently to jpg files (XMP is the format that seems to be the most open and universal). I used a program a few years ago called Picajet but it was somewhat buggy and hasn't had much development recently. I want to be able to tag the photos and then be able to view or deal with them in other programs without being stuck with some proprietary database. Anyone have any suggestions? or reasons why my request is misguided?
What Operating System? Most of the modern tools will store what it can in the file themselves (as IPTC or XMP metadata) as well as in a database for easy querying. You really want to have an external index when you are querying hundreds or thousands of files.
posted by mmascolino at 7:53 PM on September 14, 2010
posted by mmascolino at 7:53 PM on September 14, 2010
One reason it might not be the best idea is that this is slooooow. The reason programs use proprietary databases is because they can index and optimize them.
Like mmascolino says, I'd look into photo management apps that can write to XMP.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:07 PM on September 14, 2010
Like mmascolino says, I'd look into photo management apps that can write to XMP.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:07 PM on September 14, 2010
Response by poster: Access speed is not really an issue - once I tag the files I can always import in to something else if I need the speed of a program that stores the tags in a seperate Db. On quick review of Photo Mechanic, it seems to tag the files individually (I assume it can tag a bunch of selected files as well) but that isn't really what I had in mind.
Picajet seemed to have a really intuitive interface - a tree interface of nested tags/categories on the left ( ie pets-dog, -cat/gatherings - xmas2009) - dragging a thumbnail of the family dog under the xmas tree (or a selection of thumbnails) to category dog would tag the picture(s) with both pet and dog, then reselecting the whole folder of Dec2009 pictures and dropping them on the xmas2009 category would tag them with xmas2009 - was real easy to multi tag a lot of pictures quickly. A couple of other programs (Evernote for example) use a similar technique for other data that works quite well (but not for pictures)
Unfortunately Picajet had some quirky bugs and support and development are less than adequate - I was hoping there was something else out there that would make the tagging process easy and smooth.
posted by gsquared at 7:52 AM on September 15, 2010
Picajet seemed to have a really intuitive interface - a tree interface of nested tags/categories on the left ( ie pets-dog, -cat/gatherings - xmas2009) - dragging a thumbnail of the family dog under the xmas tree (or a selection of thumbnails) to category dog would tag the picture(s) with both pet and dog, then reselecting the whole folder of Dec2009 pictures and dropping them on the xmas2009 category would tag them with xmas2009 - was real easy to multi tag a lot of pictures quickly. A couple of other programs (Evernote for example) use a similar technique for other data that works quite well (but not for pictures)
Unfortunately Picajet had some quirky bugs and support and development are less than adequate - I was hoping there was something else out there that would make the tagging process easy and smooth.
posted by gsquared at 7:52 AM on September 15, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by sharding at 7:33 PM on September 14, 2010