Personal tagging at home?
Oh, Lazyweb, I am curious to know: Has anyone come up with a tagging tool for personal use? Now that I've gotten so used to Flickr and del.icio.us and the other tagging tools on the net, I would really like to have something for personal use. I am particularly thinking about my pictures, which have only a name and date value right now (plus the folder into which I drop them). But I'd love, for example, to be able to quickly retrieve all my photos with my wife in them, regardless of date or location.
I would also like this to apply to files, though at least most file conventions are read by the various desktop search tools, and I can find things almost immediately that way. (By the way, Mind Manager files are not currently indexed by Google Desktop or Lookout - they do see the file names. I don't know about the other tools.)
9 Comment(s)
said:
Oh, no! Not the dreaded "get a Mac" response. :-)
One can apply keywords to pictures in the Windows environment, and presumably the desktop search tools would deal with this. But, the interface for doing this is completely useless: right click on the picture, get its properties, select the Summary tab and edit the keywords.
Test: I've just added keywords to a picture and rebuilt the Lookout index. Lookout doesn't see the keywords.
I second the vote for picasa, though for this to work, you have to tag everything...
said:
Unfortunately, Picassa doesn't let me do things like finding all pictures I've labelled with both "Jack" and "Graham." And their label browser isn't much more better than the folder / time browser, since it is just an (unsortable!) list of labels.
"Oh, Lazyweb, I am curious to know: Has anyone come up with a tagging tool for personal use?" - asks JackAnd he gets the "use a Mac" response, which is fine, but kind of a costly solution. Anyway, there's a... Read More
I think the personal tagging issue is a big one, and one that's not yet been addressed at the OS level. The BE OS had a relational database available for tagging each file, I believe. Also, Oracle has their Internet File System, and MS has been working on WinFS for a while, but it's still in development. I wrote a few posts on using wiki words and simple text files for managing personal information, if anyone's interested (links below).
matt
Photo Blogs, Wikis, and Memories for Life
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/04/photo-blogs-wikis-and-memories-for.html
My Big-Arse Text File - a Poor Man's Wiki+Blog+PIM
http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2005/08/my-big-arse-text-file-poor-mans.html
Flickr them :) Unfortunately it doesn't save the problem of having photos indexed locally...
Try this flexible file renamer. I try and name all of my photo files with the names of people in them and include the date taken. This utility makes it a snap to do this on groups of files. And you won't have to rely on any custom software.
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Assuming you're using Windows, Jack, my advice is to get yourself a Mac.
The combination of iPhoto's keywords (tags) and the OSX Spotlight search tool works very nicely, thank you very much. That Spotlight desktop search is turning into the most useful addition from OSX Tiger for me.
Perhaps Google desktop search can see into the guts of whatever photo software you're using, assuming it allows some sort of keywording/tagging. Perhaps not. Or maybe wait for Longhorn/Vista.