chaz said:
I have tons of pictures taking up a large portion of my hard drive. I'd like
to move these off my hard drive
and burn them to CD. The problem that I forsee is having to quickly locate
an image, where I'll have to
shuffle cds in and out of the drive, hoping to luck out and find what I'm
looking for.
What I'm hoping to find is some sort of photo archiving/database software
that would reside on my hard drive
and grab a group of pictures, burn them to cd, and remember which photos are
on which cd. When it comes
time to retrive an image, all I'd have to do is query the database on some
field, and get a list of
pictures matching on any search critera with a pointer to its corresponding
cd.
If software like this doesn't exist, I probably could create something close
in Access, but I'm hoping there's
something similar already created.
There's a lot of photo organizing software around. These programs do
not burn the images to CD, you do that with your normal burner
program, then catalog the CD. Typically, the database contains the
filename and location (which CD), a thumbnail image, and keywords. The
thumbnail lets you view the image in small size without loading the
CD. Many of these programs will also extract some of the EXIF data
from the image (generated by most/all digital cameras), so you can,
for example, automatically have the date/time of image capture logged
in the database.
Freeware that I know:
Pixvue
http://www.pixvue.com/
Bins
http://jsautret.free.fr/BINS/
For Linux, not Windows. Included just in case you forgot to mention
that you weren't using windows.
File tracking system
http://www.netspace.net.au/~pjv101/fts.htm
No thumbnails
FotoAlbum
www.fototime.com
This is nominally a service, but they have a free organizing
application that can be used without the service.
ImageN
http://www.pixoid.com/
MyAlbum,
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/myalbum/MyAlbum.html or
www.myalbumpro.com
WinPhoto
http://cat-photo.sourceforge.net/
Open source, windows and other platforms.
There is a list of photo-organization software at
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Graphics/Image_Cataloguing/, but it
doesn't limit itself to freeware.
Unfortunately, I can't make a recommendation among these, as I use a
payware program for this purpose.
Features to look for:
The ability to export data to other formats. If you enter keywords or
otherwise organize your data, you will invest a fair amount of time
organizing your photos. You don't want to lose that effort if the
program stops working, or goes away, or doesn't keep up with changes
to computers and OSs, etc. So you want the ability to export the data
to a CSV file or some other format that other programs might be able
to import. Some programs use a common database (eg, Access) to store
the data.
If your images come from digital cameras, the ability to grab EXIF
data automatically when cataloging an image.
The ability to losslessly rotate your images 90 degrees. This lets you
keep your thumbnails right-side up.
Many of these programs have limited image-editing capabilities.
Personally, I find these a waste of time, as they are too limited. If
you need to edit your images, use a program designed to do that. But
some folks find this convenient.
Ability to generate slide-shows from a selected set of images.
Good filtering and selection capabilities. "I want to find that photo
I took of an elk in Yellowstone".
Hope this helps,
Terry
