photo tagging software?

September 10, 2007 9:45 AM

What is a good program (preferably free) that I can use to embed tags in my photo collection?

I'd like to tag my photos in an embedded fashion so that I can organize them without messing with the existing folder structure. (Although it would be nice to be able to alter the dir structure based on the tags if need be). I'd like to tag them in some widely used scheme that is portable, kinda like ID3 on mp3's.

The picasa interface seems ideal to me but it seems that you can only use one tag per photo and the tags are not embedded.

Is there any thing like this out there that meets the requirements?

posted by Popcorn to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Although it is not strictly speaking free*, I use iView Media Pro (available for Mac and Windows) to tag all my stuff. I use Flickr fairly extensively, and it always bothered me that I was not able to have any backup of the tags and descriptions that I put up on the site - especially as most of my descriptions are comedy gold and need to be preserved for all time.

In iView, you can add tags in the IPTC (as keywords). This field and the description field maps directly across to Flickr (and some others but I'm not making the most of it yet, I imagine).

I know have extensive tagging of my images, embedded in the files, that I can sort with within the iView programme (itr is awesome for that, and even has basic picture editing stuff - exposure levels and the like).

I think it is brilliant, and I would categorise myself as a heavy digital cam user - albeit at the compact level rather than the 'shooting RAW and messing with it in potatoshop for days' level.


*I believe, if you are so inclined, that something called a 'crack' is available freely for such things. I read that somewhere, so it may be true...

Obviously, I am no expert on these things, or have even seen one.
posted by Brockles at 10:13 AM on September 10, 2007

On a related note: When you use Picasa and Google Earth to geotag your photos, it is embedded in the metadata of the photo.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:25 AM on September 10, 2007

Using the keyword function, Picasa does just what you require. You can attach multiple keywords, and they are embedded as IPTC data in the individual JPG files. On windows at least, just hit Ctrl+K.
posted by friedrice at 10:25 AM on September 10, 2007

I use Picasa and you definitely can have multiple keywords (i.e. tags) per picture. Just hit Ctrl-K when looking at a picture. Also, the keywords are absolutely stored in the JPEG's themselves. It does use sidecar files for formats that it doesn't understand how to embed keywords but that doesn't apply to pictures.

You may still have the organizaion issues after the fact with Picasa. I personally would like some better features regarding this but so far it rocks for keyword and caption entering. I'll worry more about organization when I finish my personal back tagging project (I have about 10-12K photos remaining).
posted by mmascolino at 10:29 AM on September 10, 2007

This article talks about different ways of embedding data into photos, and compares Picasa and Adobe products.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:06 PM on September 10, 2007

Microsoft Photo Info
posted by phrayzee at 1:41 PM on September 10, 2007