This is a followup to my previous post. I’ve been taking a look at some other software applications for organising libraries of photos. This time I’ll write about ACDSee7, ThumbsPlus 7 and Adobe’s Organizer (included as part of Photoshop Elements).

First, let me state a groundrule that I have adopted: I insist that any organising software will respect any EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself. I am not interested in any image metadata being stored away in a proprietary format in the organising software itself. That way lies painting oneself into a corner down the road… However, I will accept an organiser that copies metadata from image files into its own database for performance reasons, so long as the database and the image files metadata content are kept in sync transparently (i.e. it takes no effort on my part).

So, with that groundrule in mind, I can instantly reject consideration of ACDSee 7. Yes, it can read and write EXIF metadata, but does not handle either IPTC or XMP. Instead it stores keyword metadata only in its own database. Sorry, guys, but ACDSee is not for me.

Next up is ThumbsPlus 7 from Cerious Software. I’ve actually been using ThumbsPlus 5 for years – since the days of Windows 95, when image handling by the operating system was in its infancy, and needed a boost from applications such as ThumbsPlus. Now, I quite like ThumbsPlus – it’s fast and flexible, but on balance I don’t think it’s for me. The reasons are that the program has “grown like Topsy” over the years, and now it has so many bells and whistles that I have no use for. It’s as though I can no longer see the wood for the trees. In addition, although it can read and write IPTC metadata, it does not use IPTC keywords by default, but stores user keywords in its own database. It is possible to set up synchronisation of these internal keywords and IPTC keywords. However, if you want to search on other IPTC metadata, then you need to define your own user fields in the ThumbsPlus database, and set up mapping between these and IPTC fields. While this can be done, it’s not very convenient, and it means that right from the word go, I’m having to delve into an application instead of concentrate on the task at hand.  In addition, it does not yet support XMP metadata at all. So, close – but no cigar.

And then we come to Adobe’s Organizer. First, the good thing: the editor in Photoshop Elements is excellent, so for manipulating your digital images, it is likely to have all the power that most people are looking for. But I actively hate the Organizer with a passion. I find it an appalling and clunky piece of software. Adobe should be ashamed of themselves for releasing this on to the market. And they have no excuse, it’s not as though this has been their first foray into this area. It’s clearly meant as Adobe’s Photoshop Album on steroids – but instead they have created a Frankenstein’s monster. Why don’t I like it? Let me count the ways:

1. Browsing through the library.
   Scrolling through a library of thumbnails should be as smooth as silk. Indeed, on my PC, that is exactly the experience I have with Picasa 2. Rolling the mouse thumbwheel produces a smooth scroll of the thumbnails. With Organizer, on the other hand, it’s like strobe lights in a disco. Everything jumps around wildly leading to a deeply frustrating experience. There is no smoothness at all.
2. Integration with the underlying Folder structure of Windows.
   If I rename a folder with the Windows Explorer, it’s instantly reflected in Picasa. Organizer remains blind to any changes – and I still haven’t found any way to update the Folder structure within Organizer to match the underlying Windows structure. Please don’t tell me I’ve got to delete the catalogue and recreate it. I do have folders being watched in Organizer, but this seems to mean “watch the contents – and ignore any changes to the folder names”.
3. Integration with the underlying Windows platform
   Organizer totally ignores the Windows Regional Settings. To get the European date format of dd-mm-yyyy (which is how I work), I have to press CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-D. Hello? What planet are Adobe’s developers from?Even simple things like respecting the Windows GUI guidelines would be nice. Example: I come back from a day’s photography with a hundred photos on my compact flash card. Plug it into my reader, and the Organizer shows me the photos and asks me to select the ones I wish to import into Organizer. Ah, I think, I can Shift-Click to select them all – no, says Organizer, you have to select every single one individually. Screw you, I say…
4. Backup of the library
   The Organizer’s idea of making a backup is to take a hierarchical set of folders and their contents, copy and rename every file into a flat structure (bang goes your carefully constructed folder hierarchy) and toss in a copy of the catalogue database. What is this? I call it totally braindead.Picasa, on the other hand, deals with CD/DVD and Server backups in a totally logical fashion, recreating the folder structure and copies of the content on the selected backup medium. Wonderful, simple, works.
5. Dealing with IPTC/XMP metadata
   Editing the metadata with a tool such as PixVue is instantly reflected in Picasa. Organizer remains blind to any changes. Once again, I have no idea how to kick Organizer into recognising that something has changed outside of its own little world. I also have the uncomfortable feeling that Organizer’s tags are just copies of some of the original IPTC tags when a file is first imported, and it’s not a complete mapping. For example, origin data such as sub-location, city, state and country data seem to be ignored.

As you can tell, I am really not impressed with Organizer 🙂

So where does this leave me? No tool I’ve looked at so far is perfect from my perspective, but the combination of Picasa 2 (for organising and searching – it searches IPTC/XMP metadata) and PixVue (for editing image metadata) is looking to be the front runner. And both tools are free software.

Picasa 2 does have bugs, and its biggest current drawback is that while it will list all folders, it will not display the folder tree. This is in keeping with Google’s philosophy that folder trees are “a bad thing”. However, judging by the anguished screams from Picasa users in the support forums, I suspect that Google may reconsider this. I certainly hope so. At the end of the day, it comes closest to what I’m looking for.

I’ve been photographing things since 1966. I started with 35mm (I’ve dallied with both negatives and slides). In 1997, I acquired an APS format camera and used it alongside my 35mm camera. The convenience of the APS camera (a Canon IXUS) meant that my Olympus 35mm camera was only used on “special occasions” when higher quality was essential. In 2001 I ventured into digital territory, replacing the APS camera with the digital format. I still kept the 35mm for the “special occasions” up until I acquired a 4 megapixel camera in 2003. Since that time, I’ve been taking digital format photographs exclusively.

All the above means that I have a lot of photos, in various formats, to manage. The first step for me was to scan all the “analogue” formats (35mm negatives, slides and APS) into digital format using a film scanner. I’ve now completed this, and, together with the native digital photos, have ended up with 12 GB of photos. This may not be a lot compared with some (I bet if my brother were to do the same he’d have ten times as much), but it’s enough to make me want to find a decent way to catalogue and organise them.

I’ve been looking around for a decent (and low-cost) software program to help me manage them. At first, I thought the answer was Microsoft’s Digital Image Library, a decent enough program that is packaged with a pretty good editor (Digital Pro). DIL allowed me to assign and group by keyword, as well as by other attributes (e.g. date/month/year). The keywords end up as metadata in the image file (and not in a separate database), so that in theory, they can be used by other applications. Sure enough, Windows Explorer could display the keywords, so the potential for the keywords to be used by other applications was there. So I went through my library, assigning keywords, and gradually the library took shape.

Then, last month, Google released version 2 of its picture librarian and editing software: Picasa. What was more, it was (and is) free. Naturally I downloaded it, gave it a spin, but then discovered what I thought was the fatal flaw – it didn’t recognise any of the keywords I had assigned to the image files using Microsoft’s DIL. Sigh – I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of assigning all the keywords again to all of my files.

So for the last month, that’s where it has rested. Until today.

Today, I returned to thinking about whether I should be using an online image library service. I’d looked at Flickr and Smugmug a while back, but hadn’t really thought about it in depth. Today, I starting looking at them again, in order to see if I could choose one over the other. Flickr has certainly got the technorati hyped up about it – and it does have some nice features. But, a) it’s still in Beta, and b) it does not offer a real storage/backup service – it’s primarily a photo sharing service. Smugmug, on the other hand, was set up by professional photographers with the aim of being a secure storage space for your image files, as well as enabling you to share them with friends and family.

It was while I was looking at and comparing the two, that I suddenly realised that I did not want to go through the hassle yet again of assigning keywords to every file that I uploaded.

It was at this point that I learned about the IPTC IIM (International Press Telecommunications Council Information Interchange Model) – a way of assigning metadata that is embedded into an image file. Then I learned that Adobe had taken this concept and produced an XML-based version: XMP. Smugmug supports XML/IPTC. Flickr has acknowledged that it needs to do the same.

I also came across another free software program: PixVue, which hooks into Windows Explorer and allows me to add IPTC/XMP metadata to all my image files. It’s a brilliant little application. I can even make templates to apply a set of metadata in bulk to files, so this should ease the task of re-assigning all my keywords. And the XMP standard ensures that all of the metadata I assign will be preserved – no matter where the files end up: on another Windows machine, on an online storage/viewing service, or on a friend’s Macintosh or Linux box. [Note 1: Pixvue is no longer available. It stopped development in 2007]

Then came the point of realisation: Microsoft’s Digital Image Library does not support IPTC/XMP, but Picasa version 2 does.

Right, that’s it: it’s Picasa for me from now on. Picasa is a very slick application – the search facility (which DIL does not have) is amazingly fast. DIL is dead as far as I am concerned. I only hope that Microsoft realises that they should add IPTC/XMP support into their next version of Windows (Longhorn). [Note 2: Microsoft did add support for IPTC/XMP in all subsequent versions of Windows. Hooray.]