Photo Organization And Me

12 December, 2005. 795 words.

Why is it so hard to find decent digital photo organization software?

Okay, admittedly, I am extremely picky about my software, and apparently the rest of the world isn’t. I want my software to look pretty and have a lot of horsepower under the hood. Almost all software is either pretty and superficial (and unfortunately popular), or ugly and powerful. (Wait, am I talking about software or people? Nevermind.) There’s also another important criteria in software… ease of use. It is almost impossible to find software that is pretty, powerful, and easy to use. The only examples that come to mind, out of millions of software titles around the world, are a handful of Microsoft Office products and maybe Adobe Photoshop. Hard acts to follow.

So what do I need in photo organization software? It must import from my digital camera. It must capture from my scanner (both of them). It must, must, must allow me to add meaningful captions to my pictures, and the captions must, must, must be permanently tied to the picture files. (Because someday, I will probably switch photo organization programs, or even computer platforms, and I want my captions to come with my pictures.) That means, most likely, it must support editing JPEG EXIF tags and TIFF tags. It must have the ability to not only organize the physical structure of the files and directories on the disk, but it must also be able to “virtually” organize the pictures into albums, group by categories, sort by dates and keywords, and things like that. It must be able to export slideshows and/or browsable picture albums to an easily distributable format so I can give CDs (or DVDs) to people and they can just plug them in and use them. And of course, it must be able to open an external editor to manipulate the pictures (because I have Photoshop and there’s no reason to use anything else), and it must NOT waste my screen space with cheesy effects and uselessly redundant editing features.

Here’s the problem: There is no software in the world, from freeware to ridiculously expensive, that meets my needs. Some are close. Picasa, for example, is very close… it’s definitely pretty and easy-to-use, but it is not powerful and fails quite miserably on the scanner support and picture captioning front. Perhaps someday it will work for me, but not now, and I need instant gratification.

So what’s the solution? Write my own software, of course. That’s what it always comes down to! Because I’m the only one that knows how to design decent software. (Here’s how I do it: Look at any Microsoft product, and make the software as pretty, powerful, and easy-to-use as that. Works every time.)

My biggest dilema is tying the captions to the pictures. With the TIFF format, this is not too much of a problem. Unfortunately, TIFF files are big, unwieldy, and not universally supported. With the smaller JPEG files, there is EXIF, but it is a sketchy standard and almost universally not supported.

While search fruitlessly for photo organization software, I saw an intriguing concept in a program called PFS Manager, found on profotosoftware.com. (Other software has this concept, but it was the first one I located.) The web site is riddled with typing and grammatical errors, so I’m a bit reluctant to actually download and install the trial, but it appears to be a database manager for pictures. Literally. As in the catalog is stored in some database format, most likely MS Access files.

So I thought to myself, what if I went a step further in this concept, and stored the pictures in the database as well? As binary. Crazy? Think of the advantages: The image data can be exported to any file format and any size needed. This is very handy for creating web pages, small JPEGs to email friends, big JPEGs to take to the photo printing place, or backing up the original, full-size images. The same database can even be placed on a web server to serve up picture data (with the appropriate web app, of course). The images can be cataloged and searched extensively. And, most importantly, picture caption data will be tied directly to the pictures themselves. The concept appeals to me a lot.

So what am I waiting for? Well, time, mostly. I have most of the building blocks necessary to put this together, but I have little time or motivation for writing an application of this magnitude right now. (Though, in a sense, Galleria had some of this functionality already.) So I will place this idea on the shelf and perhaps come back to it sometime in the future, if I don’t find something else I like in the meantime. Wish me luck!

Related