[ubuntu-uk] Photo Tagging and Search

[Simon Greenwood]

On 18 April 2011 08:33, Ian Pascoe <softy.lofty.ilp at 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
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