Modern Vespa

ok first off sorry about this NSR post, but I could use a little help.


I know that there are some professional photographers and designers hanging around here and I need to ask what program are you are using to organize your photos.


I've got a vp who has a hard on for keyword searches (which isn't really the way my mind works) but it's come down to a have to.


I've looked around, but am wondering what people are really using.

I'm Mac based, but it's looking like we going to need a new computer for this.


So any suggestions?


thanks

messy

Not professional, but free...I use Picasa. You can add tags, captions, rename groups of files, and add geotags. That along with a general timeline and I can find most of my stuff quickly-ish.

What about Aperture for the Mac? I haven't used it but I would think it is a professional version of iPhoto. There's a free trial on the Apple site. http://www.apple.com/aperture/

i have thousands of photos i've taken for web sites on flickr. it's easy to tag them and search by keyword within your account. i like it because you don't have to be by your pc to search your images, you can just log in to your account from anywhere.

If for some reason you end up getting a PC, Thumbs Plus is a great program. It turns everything into thumbnails, you can batch edit with a ton of different features, and it reads nearly every image format out there (even Photoshop and some raw camera formats). Easy to use, too.

http://www.cerious.com/

I use iPhoto for the many thousands of everyday photos I've accumulated, and Aperture for my feeble attempts at fine art photography.

The latest version of iPhoto on macs will certainly use and search key words.

I use photobucket. I don't know how it compares to other services however I am happy with the photobucket free service for me.

Best,
SDG

Adobe Lightroom, a little pricey but will do what you need.

I use Expression Media on a Mac.

Adobe Lightroom. I've got about 24,000 pictures in my catalog at the moment, and Lightroom is the best way I've ever found to handle them efficiently.

Lightroom is the professional product to do this and the Bridge software that comes with the Full Adobe Creative suite seems to be Lightroom-light. The Photoshop Elements has many of the same features as Bridge and Lightroom. These are all based on my experiences, YMMV. I believe these all come as Mac or PC apps and I speak both.

All of these do the tagging and rating you were discussing.

You will get all the answers you want over at dpreview.com if you want the opinion of professionals that make or loose money using these tools.

I've looked at Lightroom,


how is it with keyword searches?

thanks all,

back in the dark ages I used a program called iView, sadly it was acquired by the darkside and has since gone under.


I use Bridge now, (which am not really that impressed with) but it seems I'm going to have to set up some sort of "keyword" searchable system.

I was really hoping this "vp's great idea" was a stick, but alas in seems to be a boomerang.



again thanks for everybody's help.

messy

Fabulous. It really has some excellent tools for building useful keyword trees too. For example, you can put your geographic locations into a hierarchical structure. Then when you keyword a shot, it can bring in the keywords for the whole tree. Let's say I shoot a government building in Denver. Assuming I built the location keyword tree, I can set Lightroom to store the entire tree with each shot (USA, Colorado, Denver County, Denver). Then when I do a search on Colorado, that shot will pop up. If I search on USA, it will pop up there too.

You can also specify whether or not to include synonyms, and whether or not to use the trees when you export the file. I sometimes build up the entire taxonomy for unusual animal species in keywords, but I don't always want to export all those keywords when I send out a given pic - easily specified in Lightroom.

Lightroom also helps with the storing of captions and titles. If you shoot the same thing a lot, it eventually learns which descriptions and keywords you tend to use, and offers to automatically fill them in when you start typing.

It's hard to explain all this in a text post. But once you see it in action, you understand the utility very quickly. For me, one of the biggest benefits to Lightroom is the way it handles file management. When I pop my cards into my computer, I have Lightroom set to automatically copy them to multiple locations for backup, put them in folders by shoot date, automatically apply certain development settings, rename them to whatever project name I want, etc., etc. Not a big deal if you shoot 100 shots a year, but a huge deal if you shoot a few hundred a day.

Aperture

Search/Keyword basics:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/#organizesearch-filter

Elements came free with my scanner, and I now use it for tagging good stuff.