Tagging stuff: plural or singular?

Question

My photo collection is pretty meagre but I've noticed that over time I seem to have moved between tagging photos with the plural of a noun, like "bridges" or "mountains" and at other times, the singular "bridge" or "mountain". Anyway, it got me wondering whether anyone has any thoughts on which way is preferred, or if there are advantages/disadvantage/conventions etc.

Asked by ninesided

Answer

I think it is most important to consider how you will use tags to actually retrieve and categorize photos. If you need to search for a photo using the word "birds" you will(and should) search for "bird" to find both forms of the word. This is really the end of the debate as far as I am concerned. I can tag with either in cases like this but when I go to search that is where it becomes important to consider the most general form.

Answered by dpollitt

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What is a Picasa alternative for posting to a website?

Question

My love/hate relationship with Picasa just permanently tipped to hate I'm afraid. For no reason I can discern Picasa decided I didn't really mean to add yesterday's photos to an album and right in front of my eyes they disappeared. I don't want to waste any more time with Quirky Picasa.

What PC / web software is good for posting reduced-size (1600 pixels max width), tagged pix to the web? Cameras include iPhone (jpeg) and Canon DSLRs (jpeg & raw). The site's goals include:

• Family & friends should be able to see the photos I've added since their last visit, as well as show a guest the photos tagged "Aunt Gurty".
• People should be able to contact me to use photos for commercial purposes.

Answer

Lightroom is a great app for organisation and workflow and from version 3 you can set up your Flickr, Smugmug/Facebook, whatever sharing accounts, and post directly from within Lightroom once you're happy with your photo :-)

EDIT: Lightroom features website -- has a little video on there of publishing photos to external service. Flickr would also give you your ability to restrict access and use tags as you requested.

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How can I tag or mark scanned photos to show they are mine?

Question

I have scanned some photos of mine from prints, and I would like to mark them with some indication that I took them. Is there a recognised way of tagging photos that might survive some basic post processing?

I don't need it to be secure, just for the data to be kept if the photos are copied, maybe cropped or touched up a little.

Answer

If you can import the scanned photo into any kind of photo-workflow software, such as Lightroom, then you can add information into the "Author" and "Copyright" fields of the EXIF data. Then, when you export the file, this will be baked in to the JPG.

Alternatively you could add a watermark to the photo, though personally I hate these as they detract from the photo itself.

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How do I tag multiple photos in Lightroom?

Question

I'm processing a batch of photos in Lightroom 3.2. They are all of a Fall nature, so I want to apply the "Fall" keyword to the lot (31 of them). When I select all of them (click, shift+click), then enter the keyword in the Keywording box (in Library view), "Fall" is only applied to the first image that I selected, not all of them.

I seem to recall this works in Bridge. Is there a different way to go about it in Lightroom?

Answer

When bulk tagging, you need to make sure you are in library mode, AND that you are selecting photos from the main grid, not the film strip. I think this is a bug in LR3, however if you select multiple photos from the film strip, and then try to tag them, the tagging does not always take. It usually applies to the first photo selected, but not the rest. There seems to be a threshold to this...if you select only a few images in the film strip, it may work, but more than say 8-10, and it usually does not.

Manual Tagging in Library

When selecting multiple images from the main grid in Library mode, bulk tagging works fine. Just remember to hit the enter (return) key in the keyword box before moving on to make certain the update is actually applied to all of the selected images. In my experience, bulk tagging in the grid has always worked, while bulk tagging from the film strip has been sketchy at best, and generally never seems to work.

Painting Tags in Library

An alternative mode of tagging is to use the library painter. It is a small spray paint can icon next to the view mode icons below the grid in Library mode. Selecting this, it defaults to Keywords. Just enter the keywords you want to add, then click on the images you wish to add the keywords to. You can either click each image individually, or click and grad the spray can over multiple images in a continuous stream to "paint" on the new keywords. Click the icon below the grid again to disable paint mode.

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Is there an EXIF standard for tagging people in photographs?

Question

There are a number of websites that let you tag people in photos, such as Facebook and now flickr, but is there an EXIF standard for tagging who is in a photo, and where they are?

Answer

There is not. IPTC, another image metadata standard, also does not contain a "People" field. There's a Contact field, but that is used for contact information for the photographer.

Most people I know will store people as keywords. The main debate is whether or not to include spaces (would a photo of me be tagged as aaronhockley or as "aaron hockley"?). I don't use spaces since that simplifies things at times, but it's pretty subjective. I think the main thing is consistency... pick one method and stick to it.

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How do I append tags to photos with existing tags in Lightroom 3?

Question

Say my photos already have tags. I want to add one more tag to them, so I select them in Library, and in the Keyword pane I see those existing tags with asterisks (which means only some of the pics have this tag). Then I add new tag next to that one and press enter. As a result I see that the tags for individual photos changed to the one with literally asterisk. What is the proper way to append tags to multiple photos, already containing different tags?

Answer

The observation in your question is incorrect: Lightroom never changes the tags to literally contain the asterisk. You can show this with a simple test:

• In the Grid module, choose a folder with more than one photo in it
• Tag the first photo test1
• Now select it and the second photo (using Ctrl/Cmd click to multi-select): the Keyword Tags pane inside the Keywording panel will correctly show test1*
• Typing directly in that pane, change it to test1*, test2 and hit Enter
• Now examine each photo in turn: the first has the tags test1, test2 and the seconds just has test2.

You can also use the "Click here to add keywords" box (in the Keywording panel) or the Painter feature to achieve the same thing. Whichever way you do it, Lightroom will never alter a keyword to (e.g.) test1*.

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How can you write/convert Picasa's People tags to the EXIF data?

Question

I use Lightroom for my workflow, and I tag photos with people's names so that I can find them faster.

Since Lightroom doesn't have the "Faces" feature, I want to use Picasa's People feature for this purpose, but I don't want to work constantly with both of them. I'd rather use Picasa to tag the photos with the name tags every time I import new photos, and come back to Lightroom for the rest.

I couldn't find a way to make Picasa actually "tag" the photos (in the EXIF) with the people's names. Is there any plugin / script / ... that can make this happen?

Answer

Picasa stores faces information in the .picasa.ini files:

[test.jpg]
faces=rect64(1eb1929f885e),15441a598f9f1866
backuphash=29866

The id numbers can be found in the contacts.xml file which stores all the contacts of your pictures:

<contact id="15441a598f9f1866" 
  name="Test Test" 
  display="Test" 
  modified_time="2010-05-13T17:19:46+01:00" 
  sync_enabled="0"/>

Several programs can read these files and modify the EXIF accordingly. For instance:

• faceextract.pl ( command line perl script )
• AvPicFaceXMPTagger (GUI)

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What is the easiest way to strip 'iPhoto Original' and 'Faces' tags from photos?

Question

When I switched to Macs a few years ago, I started using iPhoto to manage all of my digital pictures. I then moved on to Aperture, and now I've just gotten annoyed with the single-file-library thing and I need to move on. Probably to Lightroom. I started uploading all of my images to Flickr as well and they all have the tag 'iPhoto Original' and the Faces feature from iPhoto tags.

What's the easiest way to strip out these tags without removing all the other EXIF information from a folder with 22 gigs of pictures in it?

Answer

I had the same problem. In Aperture, choose the Window -> Show Keywords HUD menu item. Click on the "iPhoto Original" keyword, and press the delete icon. You can do this with all other objectionable keywords.

Incidentally, Aperture allows you to have multiple libraries. Look under the File menu.

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Is Lightroom-style hierarchical tagging available in any other applications?

Question

I read this article on tagging and am in love with the idea of tiered tags as an efficient way to apply multiple, related tags. Being a cheapskate and photography amateur at best am looking for the free path to do this. I'm afraid Picassa does not support this feature. Has anyone that uses digikam or itag seen this feature? Is it available anywhere else?

Answer

f-spot and shotwell can do this. Unfortunately, they are available for linux only. You don't mention your Operating System, but I don't think these will work for you. It seems shotwell had a version for windows long ago, but can't find anything about windows on their website now :(

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