Wrangle digital photos with imgSeek (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge reviews imgSeek, an open source photo organizer. "Back in the Bad Old Days we kept our photos crammed into shoeboxes in the closet, to be pulled out once every few years for a halfhearted attempt at assembling an album. With the onset of the digital era, that should be a thing of past, right? Yet most of us have simply replaced the shoeboxes with overcrowded folders on our PCs, and because our digital cameras tend to slap on unhelpful names like DCS00032.JPG, we still have to browse through them all manually to find the ones that are of interest to us. But one particularly good open source program, imgSeek, can help you get organized."

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Wrangle digital photos with imgSeek (NewsForge)

Posted Jul 20, 2004 16:45 UTC (Tue) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

imgSeek is quite nice, but I'd still like to recommend those of you looking for an effective way of organising and searching trough large amounts of images to try kimdaba.

Like imgSeek kimdaba automatically extracts all available exif information from the images and makes it available to use in searches.

Unlike imgSeek kimdaba has a powerful and easy system to use for adding metadata to images. It comes preconfigured with categories for persons, locations and keywords, but the categories are freely adjustable.

What made kimdaba a hit for me is the fact that you can define member-groups for the keywords. This means that it's possible to get kimdaba to Grok that, for example, New York is a member of the group "USA".

With kimdaba I can say "Show me images that contain Silvia in USA" and that's literally 4 mouse-clicks. (Persons, Silvia, Location, USA)

It's a bit of work to add the metadata, but this is helped a lot by the built-in ability to tag multiple images at once. I can drag and select a range of images, rigth-click and select "New York" for example, to tag all the images from the last vacation. I spend on the order of 10 minutes to tag 200 images (that's around what my camera will hold) and to me that's quite acceptable.

metadata is stored in a xml-file, your raw images on disk are never touched at all, except if you use one of the external plugins for things like convert to black/white. The metadata contains md5sum of the images, so you won't confuse kimdaba by reshuffling or renaming the images on disk however you please.