Best practice photo tagging
May 29, 2013 4:07 PM

I've sent off my family's entire photo collection for scanning and now have 13,000 photos that I would like to tag with names, themes (sports, birthdays, travel), and maybe locations. What is best practice in photo tagging these days? What software (mac) should I use? What's the best way to tag photos in bulk so that I save time?

I've experimented with iphoto but notice that it doesn't attach the tags to the photos themselves which means I'll be locked into using iphoto forever. Ideally, I'll find a simple program that will embed tags in the jpg files themselves, will show the tags in spotlight, will have bulk tagging and/or face recognition functionality, and will keep the tags if uploaded to flikr or another site.
posted by Nickel to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
Adobe's Bridge will work very well for this. Also, Photomechanic and Lightroom.
posted by blaneyphoto at 4:23 PM on May 29, 2013


I've used Lightroom to tag location information. The way it files the photos would make it pretty easy to tag for events. I export to flickr and the tags stick around. The only part that didn't work so well in Lightroom was facial recognition but I found a plugin which lets it use Picasa for that.
posted by neilbert at 6:08 PM on May 29, 2013


I'm not a Mac user, but if you have access to a PC Microsoft's Photo Gallery will do everything you're looking for; Nikon's ViewNX is also a contender, though I don't think it has face recognition. Bonus: they're free!
posted by jmfitch at 5:13 AM on May 30, 2013


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