[lug] image databases and albums

[Neal McBurnett]

Thanks for the quick feedback, Ed & Warren.  Gallery looks very
interesting - a whole different feature set.

My first goal, before I forget what I've taken, is to associate some
comments with my photos.

Given that there are a number of very interesting image management
applications, I've started to think that adding comments to the images
themselves would allow any savvy image-management software to pick up
the data and avoid having to move it from one application's database
to another.

This is the approach taken by some windows apps like BreezeBrowser,
Zoombrowser, and others:
   http://www.breezesys.com/BreezeBrowser/                           
But they also note some things to watch out for:

  BreezeBrowser will only write comments to an image if it already
  contains an EXIF UserComment or ImageDescription tag. This is in
  contrast to other applications which create a new tag if necessary
  but this often has the side-effect of corrupting the MakerNote
  section of the EXIF data. Comments can be added to any JPEG, TIFF or
  Canon raw file if IPTC captions are selected in preference to EXIF
  comments.

And there is always the danger that many (most?) image processing
programs will strip away exif tags when manipulating the images.


The wrjpgcom/rdjpgcom tools allow for writing and reading classic jpeg
comments.  Other than a GIMP patch:
 http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2002-February/006392.html
I don't recall running across anything for linux that edits
exif data in a jpeg, other than the libexif library.  Any pointers?


I also have run across more candidates in the last day:

The Pixie image management system, written by Daniel M. Duley, the
 legendary Mosfet, shows enormous promise.
  http://www.mosfet.org/pixie/
  was part of kdegraphics?

gqview (a standard part of redhat for a while)

http://photoseek.sourceforge.net/
 version 0.3 (Mackey)  November 6, 2000

 Photoseek is a GPL web-based image cataloging and management system
 that uses both standard image comments and Adobe Photoshop (tm) type
 embedded description fields to catalog images. It uses PHP+MySQL.

igal

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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