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Software for organizing photos
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Posted by Randall Shinn
Nov 12, 2007 at 01:29 AM
I have recently come into possession of thousands of family slides and historical photographs. I hope to use a slide scanner to digitalize the slides, and a regular scanner to work with the rest so that they can be shared with other family members.
I am hoping that someone in the forum can suggest software that would allow me to tag the digital images with a variety of tags so that they become searchable. Has anyone worked with such software?
Randall S
Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Nov 12, 2007 at 01:37 AM
IDImager
Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
Nov 12, 2007 at 03:25 AM
Randall Shinn wrote:
>I have recently come into possession of thousands of family slides and historical
>photographs. I hope to use a slide scanner to digitalize the slides, and a regular
>scanner to work with the rest so that they can be shared with other family members.
>
>I
>am hoping that someone in the forum can suggest software that would allow me to tag the
>digital images with a variety of tags so that they become searchable. Has anyone
>worked with such software?
>
I’m the designer of SQLNotes which can be the perfect tool for organizing photos:
- The UI is an Excel-like spreadsheet.
- Drag-drop the files from Explorer creates a item with a link to the file
- You have user-defined columns to describe the photo (date, who’s there, where, rating, etc)
- You can add additional information as sub-items (click on the + to see the details, as in Windows Explorer)
- You can sort, filter, group easily
- Image file is not imported, SQLNotes creates a link, so the SQLNotes remains real small
- No imaging editing tool included (would be second rate anyway). You use the editing tools that you prefer! Double-click the item in SQLNotes to open it.
- You can create many such spreadsheets (called grids) where you see some or all of your pictures. Great to view the same photo in different contexts (without making copies) i.e. The grid of photos of my wife and the grid of photos of our trip to Hawaii, some of the photos will be the same. No problem!
Plus, coming soon are 2 great additions for this specific task:
- Automatic file monitoring. Tell it which folders to monitor and new pictures will be added to your SQLNotes file automatically, in a separate window so you know that they need to be documented.
- A built-in image viewer, which rotates to show constant size (portrait vs landscape)
More info at http://www.sqlnotes.net
Posted by Ken
Nov 12, 2007 at 04:13 AM
As Jan and I sometimes cross paths at IDImager, I’ll second his recommendation and add a few others.
iMatch is another powerful program, but the UI needs quite a bit of work before I would call it user friendly. There is always Google’s Picassa, which is free. Finally, one that I find well documented and affordable is FotoAlbum Pro from Fototime. FotoAlbum Pro also runs on U3, and it ties in nicely with Fototime’s web posting/printing site.
Also for your consideration, Extensis has Portfolio. Finally, I would stongly recommend staying away from MS Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro) until they figure out which end is up. MS bought the program last year and has done very little to date but change the name and raise the price.
If you want to manage photos, get a program dedicated to managing photos. All of the above play well with metadata, keywords, and allow you to view your images, things that are essential for easy management of photos.
Good luck!
—Ken
Posted by quant
Nov 12, 2007 at 09:52 AM
I can recommend ACDSee 10 Photo Manager, http://www.acdsee.com/
which I use from version 0.0 (then called AcdSee32, it was fastest image viewer, there were not many digital photos back then :) )