On 18 April 2011 08:33, Ian Pascoe <softy.lofty....@btinternet.com> wrote: > Hi all > > I have, very foolishly in hindsight, offered to help my partner to bring > order to her tens of thousands of digital pictures. You can guess what the > main problem is, one of being able to find that picture of the cute whatever > she took on holiday a couple of years ago. All the pictures are currently > stored on USB HDDs and is nearing about 1 Tb in data! Oh, and the solution > has to be cross platform, and not rely on cloud based storage.
At least you can claim you were press-ganged into it. I've got a similar situation with the photos my wife and I have taken over the last 5 years, and I'm constantly looking for a solution! > So, my first stumbling block seems to be around trying to comprehend what > you can actually store as tags in a .jpg file. I am confused as some > articles say that you can add custom tags to a jpg file and the file will > keep those tags as it is moved around, whilst others imply that as soon as > you move it from it's current location, the tags disappear; the latter seems > to me to imply that the directory entry for the file holds the tags as > opposed to the actual file itself. Shotwell seems to encode the tags into the EXIF data using a format called IPTC. I think F-Spot does as well. A list of applications which support IPTC Photo Metadata is listed here: http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/photometadatasupportlist.html?channel=CH0101 (although, for some reason, it doesn't include either F-Spot nor Shotwell, but does include Digikam) > Can somebody please clarify this for me? > > Secondly, is a cross platform app that can do the tagging - don't want > anything server based as to be honest I haven't the know how or expertise to > do this, although over time this is my goal. The top runner at the moment > is F-Spot which seems to be in the process of being ported to Windows, but > is still someway off of being ready, so any other alternatives? The USP for > this software would be for it to be able to bulk update tags. If your end goal is to have a web server to serve your photos, consider starting with a photo gallery web site, served from a locally installed web server. Something like Gallery 2 could work (although it didn't for me), or Horde's Ansel module (a new release version is due to appear shortly) will, with the right extensions to PHP provide face tagging and face detection. To make it portable, consider installing a thin linux distribution (such as Puppy) in a VM (like QEMU) or natively booting from the media storage device. I'm just looking into how easy or hard that is! :) All the best, -- Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
