Managing Photos and Picasa
If you haven’t visited my online photo album, you might want to take a look. Since I bought my first digital camera in 2000, I’ve grown accustomed to the convenience and features that digital photography offers. Yet, with all it offers, managing digital photos can be a pain.
After years of experimenting with various forms of cataloguing software (from plain text files to complex DB schemas), I’ve discovered that the photo metadata (i.e. information about the data object itself) must be distributed together. There are two standards that offer this: EXIF and IPTC.
EXIF holds technical information about a picture - like what camera, its exposure, aperture settings and time of exposure. Really useful stuff - most digital cameras now embed this data within the picture. You also need to make sure that any digital photo editor supports this as well (i.e. does not discard it when saving to a file). Well and good, but it doesn’t lend itself well to user-defined data.
IPTC fills that gap - it has several fields that allow photos to carry captions, categories and keywords. It was perfect because now the information will not be lost as I move these photos around. I now define a series of albums and IPTC helps me to associate sets of photos to these albums. In addition, captions and titles can be added to the photo that can be displayed.
With EXIF and IPTC, I now publish my photos using Coppermine, a PHP/MySQL web application. This free software supports the display of EXIF information, but not IPTC, so I supplement this with a Perl script that reads the IPTC tags and sets it in Coppermine’s database.
Photos are processed from Canon’s RAW format using BreezeBrowser, then edited using Photoshop and IPTC tags are written using Pixvue. These photos are uploaded to the website, and the IPTC captions are set in Coppermine using this Perl script. The files uploaded to the website are scaled down (to a max of 800×600) and I keep the originals on my PC.
What’s missing is that I have all these photos sitting in my hard disk (as of today: 1,400 files on 1GB of disk space) and I can’t easily find them (unless I know their filename and directory). It’s irritating, but I’ve learned to live with it.
I evaluated Picasa about three months ago (after Google bought them), and I was underwhelmed. The UI was pretty enough, but it didn’t read my IPTC or EXIF tags, and used a proprietary way of cataloguing the photos (which I’ve been trying to avoid).
This week, the Picasa team finally releases version 2. It looks like they have finally gotten their act together - the interface is still smooth, but the software now picks up EXIF and IPTC information from my photos directly. In addition it provides a great search that allows me to find keywords and captions. archiving capabilities, including integration with Google’s photo sharing site (not of interest to me).
It still has some ways to go (it doesn’t display all IPTC fields, although the search seems to pick it up), but its simply the best tool I have now for view photos on my PC. Great job, Google!