I’ve been shooting Fuji ‘FINE + RAW’ since the day I picked up the camera, but I’ve never needed the JPEGs — I process my photos using RawTherapee. Laziness!
I’ve also never managed my shots; everthing was stuffed all over the place, on serveral drives and with no order. More laziness!
Ten years down the line, I ended up with no disk space left and a complete inability to find anything. This is the price of laziness!
So…
I killed all my JPEGs, threw out all the junk (duplicates, old sidecar files, etc.), and moved everything over so it’s all in one place in a single structured directory.
This took time… A LOT of time…
But now I have plenty of room to play with, everything nicely backed up AND it’s all nicely managed.
I’ll never be lazy again.
I looked at a few different options, but KPhotoAlbum REALLY hits the sweet spot for me — it’s fast, efficient, bloat free, and keeps true to the task at hand.
It’s nice, one again, to see the faces of friends since departed, places once visited, and memories long forgotten… I haven’t seen them in years. But they’ll all be tagged and filtered, now… just a simple mouse-click away.
Out of curiosity, do you store metadata like tags in an app agnostic way? Such as if you were to change software, you will carry with you all necessary info.
I’m considering implementing tags and similar features into my image viewer and was wondering the best way to do it.
Not at present, but it sounds like an intetresting idea. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to read exif data (including any added tags and the like) and write it out to a generic format; however, you’d need to find an app that could import and use it (if I understand correctly).
In the case of KPhotoAlbum, though, it saves all its information in a single standard XML file — as far as I know, it doesn’t add anything directly to exif data itself.
My images are similarly scattered hither and yon all over my HD. I use XnView MP which can tag with IPTC or XMP or both. It’s search engine is about the best on the planet - no need to keep everything in a specific folder(s) and you can start in one folder and it looks there and in all folders below. Well worth a try, IMHO.
No mention of Digikam here? I used this program to find and remove thousands of duplicates.
I found that XnViewMP was really fast but the quality really poor I suspect I have missed an essential setting.
I’m on Kubuntu so can’t use my old favourite Irfanview
In my particular case, I specifically needed a small and efficient ‘do one job and do it well’ solution for quickly locating images among an album of thousands… and that’s it… nothing else. I’ve used both Digicam and Xnview extensively — both are great apps, but KPhotoAlbum filled a gap for me without any additional functions or features that I neither want nor need.
I have my own image viewer so I would rather use it . For me XMP is a pass because I hate sidecars. For me embedded or single file per folder is the way. Plus a central DB to keep track of everything.
. For me XMP is a pass because I hate sidecars. For me embedded or single file per folder is the way. Plus a central DB to keep track of everything.