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What's the best way to organize, tag, and search your digital photos? I've pondered this question for years, trying many different methods. But I think I've found the best free solution, and it can all be done with two simple add-ins that integrate right into Windows.
There are literally hundreds of programs that will help you to organize, view, and search your photos. I've tried dozens of them including Picasa, Preclick Organizer, ACDsee, and Photoshop Album. Most of these programs are very capable at helping you view, do simple edits, tag, and organize your digital photos. There are two problems with these programs for me. First, for some reason I have a problem with opening and running a program just to download and tag my digital photos. Some of these programs can take a while to load and seem well, bloated. Second, nearly all photo organizers tag photos in their own proprietary format. This means that if you ever decide to move to another photo organizer, you have to re-tag all of your photos. This could take a very long time if you have tens of thousands of pics.
If you are wondering what I mean by "tagging" your photos, let me explain. Digital pictures contain metadata - that is, non-picture data that is embedded in the picture file. Think of metadata as the information you'd write on the back of an analog photo. Nearly every digital camera inserts metadata into each picture file that contains information like when the picture was taken, the camera model, camera settings when the picture was taken, and more. This is called EXIF data and nearly any photo management program out there (including Windows XP) can read EXIF data. You can also include many other types of metadata such as keywords, categories, photographer, copyright, or just about anything else. Some programs can read this metadata, others can't.
Luckily, there are a couple standards for picture metadata - IPTC and XMP. IPTC stands for International Press Telecommunications Council, which is a news organization that originally developed a framework for describing pictures. IPTC has some compatibility issues and has now matured into XMP, or eXtensible Metadata Platform. This is more than you need to know, but if you really want to learn more about this, see this site.
The difficulty in this whole situation is finding programs that can edit IPTC and XMP-compatible metadata (so you can add keywords, notes, etc.) and search this data so you can find the pictures you're looking for. If you can edit XMP-compatible metadata, you can be almost certain that the data won't become obsolete or proprietary. Many programs can read and search XMP metadata, and many more will support it in the near future.
There are two free programs available right now that meet nearly all the criteria I was looking for in an image organization solution. They support XMP metadata and integrate right within Windows. The first is PixVue. Pixvue installs itself in the Windows right-click menu for pictures. PixVue has a lot of powerful options, not the least of which is the ability to add XMP-compatible keywords to pictures. PixVue even inserts small icons on image thumbnails to indicate which types of metadata a picture contains. To add keywords, just select a picture or pictures, right-click, and choose Annotate > Add. Click the Keywords tab and insert as many keywords as you like.
All of this would be useless if you couldn't search this metadata. The only free program I could find that searches XMP metadata is Windows Desktop Search. The key is to download and install the free iFilterShop XMP Filter add-in that gives WDS the ability to search this data. In my experience, WDS with the XMP add-in is very effective in quickly finding pictures with keywords tagged with PixVue.
I've found the combination of PixVue and WDS with the XMP add-in to be an excellent solution to tagging and searching my thousands of digital pictures. In my extensive Google-searching, this was the only free solution I came across (although I never saw them described together). It appears that XMP metadata is becoming more widely accepted, so any tagging should be compatible in future image management programs. I'm far from an expert on this subject, so I'd love to hear your comments about this or any other free (or cheap) image tagging and searching solutions.
