66% of people found this usefulTip from Brian Frost
Tips & tricks for perfect photo tagging.
Use a tool such as Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) as the ‘master’ program to create the tags – this is because many tools do not write the tags into the photo file, they simply maintain a local database of their own, and PSE has a nice face-tagging option too. It also supports hierarchical tags – see below.
Use a tool such as Microsoft Windows Live Photo Gallery as the general ‘non-Media Centre’ viewer. This is free, reads the tags from the photo file and will arrange hierarchical tags as a nice tree that you can browse.
Point your Media Center (MCE) tagged photos and you will find that MCE displays the top-level of each hierarchical tag allowing you to ‘descend’ through the tags to the level at which you wish to initiate a slide show.
Hierarchical tags.
A photo file JPEG can contain one or more ‘tags’ by which the file can be subsequently located, for example within a photo viewer, or more recently using Windows Search. This is in addition to its file name, allowing the creation of multiple dynamic photo albums.
The simplest tagging uses single words such as ‘Jill’ and ‘Birthday’ but although this works ok, it is much more powerful to use hierarchical tags in the same way as is used when locating a folder on your disk. To do this, a tag ‘path’ is used in place of a single tag word. For example, using the tag path:
People/Family/Jill
In one photo and the tag path
People/Friends/Jill
In another photo allows the viewer to offer you the actual tag words ‘Family’ and ‘Friends’ as separate ‘nodes’ of a tree through which you can browse. Thus you can view ‘Family’, or ‘Friends’ or even browse all the ‘Jill’ photos, since the browser will split up the tag path into tag words whilst maintaining the tree relationship (it recognises the ‘/’ character).
For places this is even more useful. Consider this tag path:
Places/UK/England/Dorset/Ferndown/Dudsbury Golf Club
Here, the root tag is ‘Places’ which keeps to a minimum the words that you are offered when you open your MCE pictures folder (my ‘root’ tag categories are ‘People’, ‘Places’, ‘Events’ and ‘Other’). The full path to this ‘place’ is through UK, England etc etc – you get the idea. By the time this tag path has been read out of the JPG by MCE or the photo viewer, you will be offered tag nodes such as ‘Dorset’, allowing you to browse all the photos you have of Dorset, or England, or Ferndown etc. To do this with single word tagging would mean having to enter each place name separately and even then you would only be shown a flat list in the viewer of hundreds of words, not a tree as you would expect.
PSE has a ‘category’ feature for organising its tags. This allows you to create these tag paths. Start with the categories I’ve suggested above and then create sub-categories. As you add categories it is easy to drag and drop these on to ‘virgin’ photos and so annotate them. Do this a bit at a time on your photos and you will soon have a neatly organised photo system that does not depend on your folder organisation. And a brownie-point note – do her child and family photos first – she’ll love it.