Tagging/Keywording Photos

[DavidSimmons]

My Hard drives are in a right mess with all my photos. Can anyone tell me the best way of tagging/keywording photos. If you keyword with 1 program can it be seen with another, ie keyword with lightroom and then search with Picassa, adobe bridge or Canon zoom browser? I like to quick view my files with windows but I have given up trying to view my 7D cr2 files with windows XP (Vista is OK)

Also what is the best program (prefferably free) to search out my duplicate images.

many thanks

Dave

 

[Russell Evans]

My Hard drives are in a right mess with all my photos. Can anyone tell me the best way of tagging/keywording photos. If you keyword with 1 program can it be seen with another, ie keyword with lightroom and then search with Picassa, adobe bridge or Canon zoom browser? I like to quick view my files with windows but I have given up trying to view my 7D cr2 files with windows XP (Vista is OK)

Also what is the best program (prefferably free) to search out my duplicate images.

I like to rename my files using exiftool. I use the original date and time taken, down to second) and the shutter count in the file name. This gives me a file name like 2011_4_1-10_20_15-2300.dng, date-time-shuttercount.dng. If there is a duplicate file, exiftool will rename it adding an incrementing number to the file name. it will be date-time-shuttercount-incrementingnumber.dng. It also can move the files into directories at the same time, so I have them moved into a directory structure based on year/month/day. Once that operation is complete, I do a search on -incrementingnumber.dng and delete the files.

Once the files are in a daily directory structure, it is easy to apply a few general tags about what that day's shooting was about. Place, event, ... very general tags. It's not like I'm shooting a lot of different things in one day, so this works to get a general order to the files. Once you have the general tags, then it becomes pretty easy to find files in any program that will let you organize by tags. You can then add more specific tags to the files you actually are going to use.

Thank you
Russell

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