Help me organize my pictures. Without Picasa.

December 28, 2006 2:30 PM

I like Picasa, but I really like open source. Like digiKam, only on Windows. Can you help?

Ok, so now that I have a decent camera, I am once again putting my "I'm not OCD but I am on TV" organizational skills to use with my pictures. I have used Picasa in the past, and it's great. Two problems: They seem to have removed tagging (yeah, I know you can do it online), and it's closed source. I really don't like the whole "locked in" thing, so I'd like a (free) open source program. As far as I can tell, digiKam is what I want, but it only works on KDE, and it's not worth me setting up a linux box.

Here's what I'm looking for:

• Can import pictures directly from a memory card and/or folder
• I can create albums containing any picture (rather like iTunes playlists)
• Can organize/display pictures by date
• Supports tagging
• Picasa isn't supposed to be used commercially. Yeah, no one will ever know, but I could be doing some commercial / freelance stuff. Commercial usage would be nice.

Is there anything like this that is FOSS, and runs on Windows (xp)?

I realize that I have just about described Picasa, but I don't want to completely sell my soul to teh Google. Not yet, at least.

posted by niles to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Response by poster: Or, I guess: Is there a good way to keep my pictures organized in a similar fashion under Windows?
posted by niles at 2:31 PM on December 28, 2006

Windows Vista supports tagging of images in the file explorer. It ain't free or open source, but it falls nicely into the Windows category. Why use an application when the Operating System will do it for you?
posted by blue_beetle at 3:09 PM on December 28, 2006

Have you actually used digiKam? It doesn't come close to Picasa in terms of usability or features. I spent some time trying to use it, but it would crash, lose photos, sport a poor tagging interface, and other annoyances.

When Linux Picasa came out, I switched to it, and haven't looked back. It's years ahead.

I'm not saying there isn't an open source organiser, but digiKam isn't it, even if it could be made to work on XP.
posted by Neon at 3:31 PM on December 28, 2006

Response by poster: I haven't used digiKam, but the feature set seemed to be what I wanted. I had considered throwing it in Virtual PC or something, but haven't had time yet. Thanks for the info.


blue_beetle: I actaully have a Vista pre-release, and I might be picking up a "real" copy sometime soon. I'll have to check into that.
posted by niles at 4:08 PM on December 28, 2006

They seem to have removed tagging

Just wanted to point out that Picasa does allow tagging, but calls it "keywords". It's under the View menu, or hit Ctrl+K.
posted by platinum at 11:40 PM on December 28, 2006

Response by poster: Well, that would explain why nothing came up when I searched for tags in the help file. Thanks.


So, to wrap things up, I guess I will be using Picasa. It does what I need fine enough, and there doesn't seem to be anything else even close - maybe this is something that should be explored in the Open Source arena.

Thanks for all of the info.
posted by niles at 10:04 PM on December 29, 2006

You might want to check out picajet if you use flickr. I really like Picasa, but the lack of flickr integration kept me looking.

Picajet has direct integration to flickr (as a plugin) which includes the tags and description of the photo when it gets sent to flickr. This is what picasa could not do for me and I'm not willing to tag my photos once in picasa and again on flickr.

I also like the way you tag photos in picajet. You simply select and drag your photos onto a tag (called categories actually) and they are automatically assigned. The sorting and organizing features of picajet seem to blow picasa away in my short experience with picajet so far.

There is a free version available. The full version is fairly cheap (around $25 USD i believe).

Picajet
posted by gfroese at 6:45 AM on January 3, 2007