Hi! I'm looking for a software application that will help me manage my large and growing collection of image files. One example is the EXPhoto appliction that is included with PhotoDeluxe, which is nice, but does not seem to allow me to create album files in more than one directory. What would be really nice is a program that lets me insert keywords directly into the jpeg file - my Kodak DC260 includes some info within the jpeg, but if I could add more, and if I could do searches thru my collection based on these keywords, it would be very helpful. Any suggestions? And - this would be a good subject for a review...

-- thanks, Charlie Wallace charliewallace@iname.com

-- Charlie Wallace (charliewallace@iname.com), September 28, 1998

Answers

You're right, this would be an excellent subject to review - one of the many things on our "some day" list...

I don't know of anything that embeds data directly into the JPEG header, although that would be a neat trick. There's a myriad of image organizers out there, some good, some not so. Two of the better packages (IMHO) are Portfolio by Extensis and ImageAXS Pro by Digital Arts and Sciences. Both support keywords, ImageAXS is a bit more powerful in terms of letting you create your own database fields to accompany the pictures. There are a bunch of these organizers out there, but the two I mentioned are ones I've had personal experience with, and either would be a good place to start.

(If others have good experiences with other packages to share, please chime in! - (Discrete) postings from software manufacturers would also be welcome!)

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), September 30, 1998.

The jpeg v6 library comes with sample applications (rdjpgcom and wrjpgcom) which write COM (comment) datablocks into JPEG files. These comments are just like the blurbs that cameras use to store image data (they use the APP12 tag to avoid conflicting with comments).

Any application which can do handy things like lossless rotation and cropping can also manipulate comment blocks with a little extra code).

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), October 04, 1998.