On 18 April 2011 08:33, Ian Pascoe <softy.lofty....@btinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi all > > I have, very foolishly in hindsight, offered to help my partner to bring > order to her tens of thousands of digital pictures. You can guess what the > main problem is, one of being able to find that picture of the cute > whatever > she took on holiday a couple of years ago. All the pictures are currently > stored on USB HDDs and is nearing about 1 Tb in data! Oh, and the solution > has to be cross platform, and not rely on cloud based storage. > > So, my first stumbling block seems to be around trying to comprehend what > you can actually store as tags in a .jpg file. I am confused as some > articles say that you can add custom tags to a jpg file and the file will > keep those tags as it is moved around, whilst others imply that as soon as > you move it from it's current location, the tags disappear; the latter > seems > to me to imply that the directory entry for the file holds the tags as > opposed to the actual file itself. > > Can somebody please clarify this for me? > > Secondly, is a cross platform app that can do the tagging - don't want > anything server based as to be honest I haven't the know how or expertise > to > do this, although over time this is my goal. The top runner at the moment > is F-Spot which seems to be in the process of being ported to Windows, but > is still someway off of being ready, so any other alternatives? The USP > for > this software would be for it to be able to bulk update tags. > > Unless anyone knows different, I think that the last requirement which is > to > be able to quickly search for items meeting a set of criteria will have to > wait until I bite the server bullet. I should say that the only criteria I > have here is that the files themselves should not solely exist as blobs in > a > database for retrieval. This is my partners requirement as she want to be > able to physically take her pictures with her when we go a visiting to > parents to show them off as they don't necessarily have access to the > internet through either wired or wireless means. > > Any help and guidance would really be appreciated. > > EXIF data is the only data that is stored in the file itself, and the fields are fairly arbitrary - you end up storing in the description field, which some photo managers use for tags and geodata and the like. There isn't a lot of space in there so additional information is often stored in a database: Picasa, which would be the obvious cross-platform choice, does this, and syncs it to Picasaweb, but isn't therefore portable. It also doesn't survive across conversions. With those restrictions in mind it looks Phatch[1] might fit your requirements. It's in Software Centre in 11.04. Otherwise I would have a go at bit of scripting with a CSV file and exiv2. 1. http://photobatch.wikidot.com s/ -- Twitter: @sfgreenwood "Is this your sanderling?"
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