Totally unrelated to Jaangle

[miskairal]

Alex I have a question for you. It's about photos and you are the only programmer I "know" ;)

I have thousands of photos as I'm sure many people do. I have them sorted into folders by date taken. I've been pretty slack and haven't renamed most of the photos but part of the reason is that many contain many people (or pets) and that would be hard to name. So now if I want to find a good photo of my dog for instance, it takes me ages.

I have discovered a thing called IPTC metadata which is similar to the EXIF data in that it is stored in the file with the picture. I have found a small programme that allows writing to the IPTC metadata from within windows explorer but it's not easy to use - you have to right click on each photo go to properties, type each keyword in then click an add button then type another keyword. I haven't found a small programme though that will allow me to search those keywords. I believe iTag will do it but it requires .NET which seems a little over the top for something that should be so simple. There are 3 other freeware programmes that I THINK will do what I want but I'm not sure and don't really want to install them simply because they seem a bit large/more than what I need. They are Kalimages, Irfanview and XnView.

Is this something that should be fairly easy do you know? To write a programme that will allow entry and searching of IPTC data? Is this something you could do?

PS. I'm trying to avoid using a programme that will allow entry of keywords in a proprietary format that could become obsolete or unusable down the track.

Cheers

[outcast1000]

I think that it would be fairly easy. (The logic should be the same as Jaangle_
Anyway check also this free one from google (I don't know if it uses proprietary format)
http://picasa.google.com/

[miskairal]

Thanks Alex. I tried Picasa a few years ago but didn't like the way it sorted my photos. I seemed to end up with some folders repeated and others missed out.