61000 Photos Need Tagging
Help, I need your advice. With 61000+ photos I am, again, stuck between Picasa v2.0 and Adobe’s Photoshop Album v3.0 to process and organise all my shots from the silly to the sublime.
Picasa – I love the ease of use of Picasa’s quick and easy photo editing – cropping, simple adjustments of fill-light/shadow/highlight, tinting, collage making tools, sharpening, etc. I hate Picasa’s lack of effective tagging and it’s categorization/indexing which requires you to move your photos to specific folders for each category.
Photoshop Album – I love Adobe’s quick and easy tagging – just drag and drop onto the photo; and its time line and tag indexing – just click the tags you want to see and the appropriate photos are displayed. Because of how my brain works I like my photos organised with the
other photos I took at the same time. Because of how my brain doesn’t work, I need to tag my photos heavily for future personal and professional use.Whining – I don’t love having to use separate programs for each separate task. I
don’t love having to import photos twice with two different pieces of software. I don’t love having to process each photo twice – once to ensure it’s pretty and then again to tagged it
for future reference.
So I’m turning to you. What would you suggest? How do you do it? Any new tools that have fixed all these problems for you?
good question. i’ll be happy to read the answers. i use picasa for all the reasons you mention, but i’m realizing now that tagging and creating useful metadata is something that i really really need to start doing more effectively.
I only just started using Picasa and am impressed with what it can do; however, I agree entirely about the tagging thing. I installed it in the hope that it would allow me to do exactly that. I have not tried the Elements that you mention.
I’m all ears to hear about any other suggestions!
thanks guys. I do hope someone with suggestions responds.
I use the flickr organiser for group tagging. Of course, that only helps if you can search for another tag, grab an entire group of photos, and then you can tag them all again. Do you mean to organize the photos in your computer or on flickr?
I wonder whether this might be any good for tagging:
http://itagsoftware.awswa.com/
I’ll check it out when I’ve got a bit of free time. Of course, it still doesn’t offer the one-stop-shop that we’re looking for.
I downloaded iTag and it’s clunky and slow, but bloatfree and simple. It feels a little geeky.
I also just fired up my MacBook and played around with iPhoto for a while. It seems to be just what we’re looking for, at least as far as I can tell in the half hour or so that I’ve been playing with it. It allows tagging and has some pretty neat Picasa-like editing features (although I think that I was enjoying Picasa’s ease of use a little more after a half hour of use).
I’ve also downloaded a free trial of Aperture for the Mac and will check that out too. I don’t know how much it would cost to buy if I decided to go down that route.
For slide shows and photo viewing, iPhoto is superb. This is my first Mac (I have two XP Pro PCs and a Linux based file server) and, now that one of our flat panel LCDs is beginning to die, it’s got me thinking about replacing the family PC with a 17″ iMac. Who’d have thought it.
I’m still all ears to hear if anyone has any suggestions for PC software. So we want Picasa, but with good tagging features. Anyone?
You might take a look at ACDSee Photo Manager 9.
Hey all.
I discovered this comment via a referrer in my site stats a while back
Anyway – thought I would let you know that iTag now loads images ridiculously fast with the latest build I just published.
Couldn’t do much about the geekiness though. It’s just an inbuilt trait 🙂
anyway – check it out to see if it is a better fit for your tagging now.
I use Picasa extensively, but the tagging is a little laborious. However, I have a feeling that tagging my similar large number of photos is going to be laborious no matter what. Especially seeing as I need to go through every photo and append each person’s name if this operation is going to be in any way useful.
I might look at iTag
I’ve found “key words” combined with the “search” capability in Picasa does what I was looking for, though it’s not especially quick.
iTag‘s tagging is compatible with Picasa and Flickr, so if it is quick it might be the solution.
Call me lazy or shutter-happy, you’d be right on both counts, I’m just not all that interested in lauching more than one application to deal with my 100-200 photos a day.
Alex & everyone else – if you do try iTag, please come back and let us all know how it worked for you.
Well, I have a piddling 8000 photos to tag, though I’m not sure when I’ll get round to testing iTag out, I’ve a tonne of work on at the moment and a Java course to finish in the next 10 days.
And I know once i start tagging I loose whole days. Same happened when I started correcting id3 tags on my mp3 collection. It took about 2 days of solid work to get from A to D! Too much music!
No pressure!