Photo Software
June 19, 2004 3:06 PM   Subscribe

Can anyone help me find photo organization software with some specific characteristics? I use WinXP. I want to be able to place each photo in multiple categories, and I'd like to be able to output the categories as simple .html files, as that is my archival system of choice. I don't care about uploading to the web. Free is better, but I am willing to shell out a few bucks for the right software.

I bought a new scanner recently and I have hundreds of photos to scan. I'd like to be able to just dump the simple .html files and pix to cd's for archival purposes, and not have to rely on some special software to view the captions / descriptions and categories later on. (I'm hoping in 20 / 50 / 100 years it will still be easy to view a simple web page).

Ideally I'd like to be able to output the categories as a single long web page where I can just scroll through the pictures, and / or with "previous" and "next" links so I can sift through them one-by-one. I have used snapgallery and like it, but it doesn't have an option to output one huge web page with all the pictures on it, and it's sort of limited.

There are thousands of photo organization software packages out there, I just don't know exactly where to begin to find one that does what I want (nobody ever says anything about the multiple-category thing on the description, so I'd have to try out each and every one...). I'm looking to save some time here so I don't have to spend a year trying out all the different options.

Oh yeah, software that works on XP would be ideal, but failing that, if it can work on Linux I can set it up on a server to generate the pages.
posted by beth to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)
 
iview is the best software I have found for any and all photo organization tasks.
posted by darkpony at 4:05 PM on June 19, 2004


Response by poster: Someone on #mefi recommended to me Adobe Photoshop Album, which looks as though it might give me what I need. I'm playing with the crippleware evaluation version I got from their website, but I'll have to get and try out the full version to see if it will really give me what I want.
posted by beth at 4:22 PM on June 19, 2004


I don't suppose you are either running PHP on your machine or are willing to upload the files temporary to a PHP4 webserver to generate the static HTML pages -- are you?
posted by rafter at 4:26 PM on June 19, 2004


I stick by my recomendation. Photoshop Album is killer.
posted by Grod at 4:58 PM on June 19, 2004


The Adobe PSA is superb -- at least in the 2.0 release. So ditto.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:05 PM on June 19, 2004


Response by poster: rafter, I can run php if necessary. Was there something you would suggest in that case?
posted by beth at 6:27 PM on June 19, 2004


Photoshop Album 2.0 is the way to go.
posted by Jairus at 7:11 PM on June 19, 2004


Response by poster: Yeah I have to agree. Now that I've had a chance to mess around with it, it looks like it's just what I need. Thank you everyone!
posted by beth at 7:19 PM on June 19, 2004


darkpony, thanks for recommending iview. Pretty cool!
posted by dobbs at 7:32 PM on June 19, 2004


beth, Photoshop Album sounds like it will probably be your best bet -- if you're still interested in a much much more roundabout method, though, <self-link>I've been working on a free photo gallery/photoblog script: one image per page, next/forward links, thumbnails, text-file or web-interface captions (which can be HTML-resized versions [width="x"], especially since you will be saving the files locally). It does not do it yet, but by the next release (Tuesday, hopefully) it will support categorization (each image can belong to multiple), and will allow you to export static .html files (one filer per image per category). The catch: it's in PHP, so you'll need to either upload all your pictures to PHP-enabled webspace temporarily or have PHP running on your machine.
</self-link>
posted by rafter at 8:17 PM on June 19, 2004


Another vote for iView - I use it for all sorts of sorting, filing and presenting. It's great.
posted by milovoo at 9:57 AM on June 20, 2004


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