Image catalog software - again :)

It's been a few years since I last asked this question.

I've since been using Photo Mechanic for my tagging needs, but I have no good catalog software that easilly lets me search for indoor photos of a particular dog breed, or Winter images of my kids, find untagged images, allow me to easilly maintain hierachies of keywords and aliases. I have around 700 000 Images, and without a catalog of some sort, I am completely lost.

What I am after is software that lets me organize images by keywords and location in the easiest possible way. I need the keywords to be hierarchial (i.e: people->Models->Vanessa) so that I do not have to Waste time dragging over "People, models, Vanessa" independently. I would also appreciate a set of location attributes so that when I tag an image with the town I was in, I automatically get the county and country filled in. Easy stuff.

Adobe

Adobe disqualifies itself from DAM software for several reasons, the most important one being that you cannot work multiple computers against the same catalog at once. Also, because Lightroom stores information about the images in the catalog file instead of the file itself, it means that unless I'm swearing to jpg or XMP, all my tagging work is wasted when I send the image to AP or the likes of them. Embedded XMP / IPTC is the standard that Adobe is blatantly disregarding, so they become useless for cataloging.



FotoStation

The best cataloging software that I've worked with is FotoStation by Fotoware. This is easilly the king of DAM's out there. However, they seem to insist on regenerating the embedded JPGs in my NEF files, as well as writing sidecar XMP files, making it impossible for me to use. The feature I used the most in FotoStation was the ability to just drag/drop entire keyword trees onto a set of images in order to tag them. For example, after a shoot, I would quickly just drag over people->models->XXX onto all images to the images from that set.

Photo Mechanic

Photo Mechanic is close to Fotostation, however, instead of using a TreeView to oranize keywords, they insist on some weird multi-column screen that is very slow to work with, as well as prone to errors, since it shares keywords with a concept they Call "Paths" that makes it confusing.

Does anyone know when the Photo Mechanic guys are coming with a catalog software? It's been on their site forever "in Development"

ACDSEE & ThumbsPlus

I put these two into the same category, even though it may seem unfair to ACDSEE. Both had serious issues with RAW files last time I tried them, and had no reasonable way to organize keywords.

Stuff has probably happend on all titles above, there may be new titles out there also - so I wanted to check with you guys if you've found something that makes cataloging your images easier.

I truly didn't know ThumbsPlus was still in business. However, I assure you ACDSee handles RAW just fine. I switched to ACDSee PRO 6 early this year from Lightroom and haven't regretted it one bit. Regular ol' ACDSee 17 is really the same as the "manage" tab found in Pro 6 (now Pro 7), so I doubt that there are any issues with raw there.

Have you given any thought to Photo Supreme?


I've been using to over a year now, and it certainly addresses many of your requirements...

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Attached is a screenshot of ACDSee Keyword organizer tools. You can create a hierarchy of keywords so they are placed into logical groupings. There is a virtually identical management methodology for Categories as well.

In Pro 7, you can also create and switch between multiple databases and thereby create a hard separation between different sets of keywords and categories built around different needs. I'm not sure if that has been implemented in regular ol' ACDSee 17.







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I still like soup. . .
Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .

Glen, that looks great!

I've dismissed ACDsee so many times, maybe I should consider it again soon

So if you're clicking on a "leaf" category, you apply ALL The keywords up to the root?

Thanks all for replying by the way, I'm testing out all your tips

Pedro

I'm not a big keyword user, but I don't recall that assigning a lower level keyword, also assigns the higher level. You might need to DL the free trial and experiment.

Also attached is an example of the search capabilities. You can search on almost any criteria that can be used to describe the photo.







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I still like soup. . .
Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7267302@N03/

Follow-up on ACDSEE

I've downloaded and tried out ACDSee 7 Pro now, and it's still weird:

• Still not able to click on a deep node in the tree and have all the parents selected. I held down shift/alt/ctrl in various combinations, but only the keyword I click is selected and not its parents.
• Keywords applied from the manage / Organize tab differ from those in IPTC
• Adding keywords from the Manage / Organize screen does nothing to the file
• Adding keywords using Photo Mechanic and Live Photo Gallery (both embed IPTC to file) does not show up in ACDSee after selecting view/refresh

Also, it appears as if Keywords on IPTC is a different thing than Manage / Organize?

I tried looking for some settings on this, but found none.

I updated my previous post, you might want to look at it as well.

But if I understand what you are asking for. You want to embed the keywords into the file itself. ACDSee will do this but it will still use its own database for searching (unless you tell it otherwise). You can embed the metadata by selecting Tools/metadata/Embed ACDSee Metadata

See attached photo:



This is a feature rich organization tool and I am far from an expert (I'm not that big on advanced organization, I use it more as a Raw developer). Trial users are free to ask question in the ACDSee sponsored User community forum. There are users there who REALLY know the stuff you are asking for: http://forum.acdsee.com/

If you can't get in, let me know and I will be happy to submit questions for you.



--
I still like soup. . .
Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7267302@N03/

Another vote for Photo Supreme. And it lets you assign parents in the hierarchy.

Key wording is my next 'todo' after organizing a massive 8 year cluster fark of Key West photography. Noticing a lack of LR mentions, am i to understand that key wording in LR may be one of its weaker points?

Lightroom offers some basic but good image management features. For a novice those are more than sufficient. If you're already using Lightroom, then use LRs keyword features first. Then as you gain better understandings and you need more features then you can always step up to more sophisticated software.