Since many of us take photos when flying, this is aviation related 
Tags are words which you attach to photos taken, usually in a picture viewer / image editor / etc, which say something about the pic. So for example this
might be tagged with
Alps
Kaprun
Zell am See
lake
dam
mountain
snow
or whatever. Then, when you are looking for photos from some place, you can find them quickly.
Some people do tagging religiously, most don’t bother. I haven’t done any but sometimes I spend ages looking for some photo.
The key issue is where are the tags stored. I think in most cases they are not stored in the image file, but are stored in a separate database which is proprietary to the picture viewer (e.g. ACDSEE and Lightroom have a tagging feature). I went on a 2-day Lightroom course and the presenter was keen to push LR as the default picture viewer which, apart from LR being a rather crappy app for that job (clumsy user interface for fast viewing, IMHO) locks you into using LR for ever… and bear in mind that Adobe are moving to the continuous ripoff continuous software rental model.
This is obviously a futureproofing problem… It would be much better to store the stuff in the EXIF header of the Jpeg. Is there a standard for it? Does anyone do this, and if so, how and what software do they use?
Incidentally, a different approach which can be usable for “landscape” pics is to use a picture viewer which places pics on a map according to the GPS position in the EXIF data, but most DSLRs don’t have a GPS, and some phones fail to get a GPS fix, especially if there is no wifi around, or refuse to store a location at all if you have disabled wifi based location (that is a Samsung trick).
I did some digging and found this which led to IPTC and this and that led to the discovery that IPTC support is rather variable. Most image viewers use proprietary tagging methods even though e.g. ACDSEE does support IPTC tags. Also some photographers seem to prefer the “XMP sidecar” method whereby the tags are stored in a separate (very small) file which you then have to make sure is maintained along side the image in question. There are also batch methods for processing IPTC.
One key point is that when storing an IPTC tag, the image file is obviously written to, which could mess up the file date. It also creates issues for archiving. If the archive process detects the change, everything will be re-archived. If it doesn’t, nothing will get backed up So ideally one needs to do the tagging ASAP after taking the pics, before archiving them.
This is in ACDSEE. You can tag groups of images in one go, which is great for trip photos. I haven’t yet found a quick way of searching by IPTC tags across directories (folders) however.
The funny thing is that Windows Explorer (this is win7-64, winXP’s Explorer doesn’t seem to have this feature) can display the IPTC tags:
Hopefully somebody may find this useful.
It does sound like very few people bother with tagging although professionals seem to do it.
One easy solution I use, is loading all my pics from my flights on Google photos. it has unlimited storage for high resolution (not original file, but for just looking at the photo on my laptop it’s good enough) and has a neat feature that simply “understands” what’s in the picture. Ok, it won’t recognize Innsbruck from Bolzano, but if I type Alps, sea shore, plane, cockpit, props, runway, etc.. I can easily find the picture I needed, considering it also gives me them sorted by date, so I can quite easily remember when I went where.
It works fine for me, and no need to do the extra work.
I wonder what google does with the photos, as the quid pro quo for giving people all that storage
As the saying goes: “if the product is free, you are the product”
Also you need internet access for it to work.
true, but either we stay out of it completely (very radical position to actually maintain) or since they already know everything about us, let’s at least benefit from a few advantages that come with it.
When is it that you don’t have Internet available nowadays? Maybe at cruise level, but then I’m taking pictures, not searching them :)
I guess it depends on your view of the future, the value of your photos and movies, and whether you will always be able to rely on some “free” online service.
For sure there is a whole generation of (mostly young) people who live for today and to whom yesterday is gone and thinking about tomorrow is “what boring people like parents do” and this is what drives the whole social media etc scene, but I bet you that most “free” sites will be gone in 10 or 20 years’ time. Flickr is still there but frankly barely usable, with stupid popups asking you to sign in, Photobucket is barely usable now and is now blocking the serving of images linked on websites (unless you have a paid account) which has resulted in vast numbers of missing images in forums of all kinds, Imgur is likely to collapse eventually too for the same reason… and while Google itself should be around “for ever” you cannot rely on a given service being maintained. And tagging is a really time-consuming process; you really really don’t want to mess up the tags.
Also any online storage has to limit the file size. Good quality jpegs are ~10MB which is barely practical. According to one former resident here with a business out there, Egypt has faster ADSL than the UK, but the standard “fast” ADSL is 30mbps down and 3mbps up, which is no good for files of that size.
For my photos, I prefer to control my storage and my backup strategy
