Question

Topic: Other

Photos - Tool To Save & Then Search On My Own Pc?

Posted by Anonymous on 8/7/2009 at 6:45 AM ET 125 Points
Hi all,
Over the years we have built up a catalogue of photos that we have used in Marketing literature, Events, Advertising etc.. Normally these are saved in descriptive terms e.g. Tree or Chain (or whatever) as a jpg or pdf file, within our 'Images' folder and probably then within a sub-folder either titled by Date (e.g. 'Aug09') or Title (e.g. 'ProductBrochure').

This then means though, that when I or more to the point, 'those who do not work on a specific marketing piece and therefore do not know about certain images' - go to look for a photo/image we typically have to go into each folder & view each image via Thumbnails. Wasting a lot of time.

I'm wondering though is there a better and easier way to store these images & files. Especially to allow for easy search functionality perhaps even mirroring the way image/photo libraries store theirs.
I understand this would mean I would be required to enter the description words & tagwords myself - but for the addition of 1 minute extra work when using a new image - it could potentially save me, and especially my colleagues, a lot of time when looking for a particular image.

I hope my post makes sense and look forward to any suggestions or thoughts?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Inbox_Interactive on 8/7/2009 at 7:36 AM Accepted
    Try Google's Picasa.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/7/2009 at 9:21 AM Accepted
    You're looking for an image database, such as:
    https://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/programs.html
    https://www.primasoft.com/deluxeprg/photo_organizer_deluxe.htm
    https://www.microsoft.com/Education/PictureDatabase.mspx
  • Posted by steven.alker on 8/7/2009 at 1:24 PM Accepted
    Dear Dave

    I guess that you are looking at an individual PC or a network, not a MAC which has its own programme built in.

    Jay’s suggestions are pretty good. But I’ve plumped for Picasa for about 10,000 images. You to have to tell it which folders to index, including the Temporary Outlook ones on the network for othe people's images,archive and deleted emails. (For attachments and embedded images)

    Also before you rationalise your collection, before retrieving and moving them, and for the sake of Windows Search Index it is best to rationalise them into appropriate folders. You can do this in Picasa. change the folder names and locationd

    If you do that again, re-index Picasa ASAP.

    It works in the background to create the index and is very, very quick.

    That’s Picasa being told where to look and where to monitor – not manually moving everything to your image folder.

    If you don’t like Google, you can also use Windows Media Player, set for images or image media in the left hand tool bar, but it is a lot harder to set up and everything has to be moved to and then indexed to the Media Player library.

    You will possibly come across many duplicates in Picasa because. If this is the case then lob out into a duplicates bin which can dreate in Media Player. Picasa’s de-dupe capability is pretty good. Only 15 years ago, I bought a picture and document storage devciea a cost of £45,000 do just this job. Picasa is actually better!

    Hope this helps

    Steve Alker
    Xspirt


  • Posted by Tracey on 8/7/2009 at 1:55 PM Accepted
    A friend of mine (my old COO) just started a digital asset management software company. It's worth checking out - the most full-featured product I've seen on the market that's in a low price range. whaledrop.com. I believe they are still in beta phase, but you can email them if you're interested in becoming a beta tester.

    It includes the ability to tag images, and it also automatically tags images based on the metadata for the image. (For example you could search "tif" and it will return all your .tif files). It also saves each image automatically in multiple versions. Hope that helps...
  • Posted on 8/13/2009 at 4:07 AM Author
    Thanks all, some great advice here.
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