The Media Center Show #231 – Tagging your photos

I think you guys should get commission from adobe , Im downloading the trial right now. My flat tags have become unmanageable and using the people tags on live photo app they dont appear in MCE.  This will certainly get me brownie points

Mark

I too listened to this weeks show.  I decided to download the freeware application iTag feom www.itagsoftware.com

I have just had a play and it appears that your can easily manage and add tags.

When I then went back an viewed in Windows Live Photo Gallery, all the new tagged date was there.  I then dragged the folders to create the hierachy I wanted.

Regards,

Richard

@invicta - Take care though - your hierarchy is probably only in the database used by the viewer. For future-proffing your photos, right-click them, choose proprties and look at the tags embedded in the picture - I'll bet they dont show the hierarchy for you.

Brian

Thanks for getting to this topic. As they mentioned having the actual photos tagged is a HUGE luxury in Media Center. I also love having the hierarchical tags that only force the user to drill down a level or two to get to a topic they want to see.

There are a few points I'd like to make though:

* Brian is correct in the fallacy of Picasa (that it doesn't change the tag in the photo itself, but keeps the data in a separate database file). The other problem with Picasa is that it does not allow tag hierarchies, so "Cruise" will be right next to "Christmas" and "Chrissy" in the list of tags - a mess if you have 50 or so tags!!

* Brian did not get to the organization of the physical file. Because we all have more than one camera in the family, it is important to rename the files so that there are not two IMG1003.jpg files in the system. Therefore, move all of your files from the picture card to a temporary directory (I call it "Unprocessed photos"). Then use a little, free program like dim.jar (www.alanlight.com/.../Dim.htm) to rename the pictures and move them to a folder hierarchy based on date taken. I use the filename of YYYYMMDD-XXX.jpg (where XXX is an arbitrary 3-digit number that is assigned for the photo in the batch.). This way if you are browsing photos and you see something called 20081225-134.jpg, you know that it is the 134 file from Christmas in '08. (\shared pictures\2008\12\20081225-134.jpg).

* Windows Live Photo Gallery does everything Brian mentioned he does with the bulky, expensive Adobe product! Tagging with a hierarchy is perhaps EASIER in PG than in AP. PG doesn't really do face recognition, but really, every picture likely needs to be tagged and Event-based and/or Location-based tag anyway, so I don't see the need for it. Bottom line, save your money and try Windows Live Photo Gallery.

What I really love about tagging the image itself, is that the image tags are transferred with the images if you put them on a CD for family members. When they import the old family photos you've scanned into Photo Gallery, the entire tag structure is right there for them, so they don't have to do any of this work you've already done.

Thanks for a great show!

Great episode and comments!  I have lived in this world for music and it was like a smack upside the head when I listened to this episode.  Great think to the Dim.jar tool as well that made me organizing my files to get ready for a mass tagging exercise SO much easier.

Keep up the great work!

Ive been using the trial of adobe since the show but although the tags in the application show for example people  family  mark  only the mark is saved in the file when I update the file.  So in media center the tags remain flat.

Im doing something wrong any pointers

Mark