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Photo Taggng (n00b) question

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daddydave:
Never mind, I think I found it.

detailsI finally am getting around to organizing my digital photos, I have everything sorted by folders named according to the yyyy-mm and photos named yyyy-mm-dd.extension and intend, and have already started, tagging photos based on occasion, where I used folders for that purpose earlier. I was able to tag multiple photos easily within the Windows 7 Explorer. The thing is, I haven't tagged photos in a while, and I don't see any obvious way to view by tag in Explorer or Google drive. In Picasa and probably in Windows I can do a search by tag and find photos, leading me to think tagging is only good for searches. Is there a basic photo organizer that just lists tags on the side like folders so anyone can just browse the tags? It seems like I just made everything harder to find for everyone.

IainB:
If you are already using Picasa, then you can use Tools-->Experimental-->Show tag as album.
I use that in Picasa quite a bit, and find it very handy.

The trouble with tags is that they are usually data attributes within a photo-management database, and if you get a wrecked/corrupt database (as has happened to me once with ACDSee and twice with Picasa), then you can lose hours of work invested in building the data in the database. They are not usually easy to recover intact. So don't rely on the resilience of the database, because they are probably not all that resilient.

My workaround: Instead rely on the data you can store within the image file. If you have mostly .JPG files then you can have EXIF data for any camera-related data, and IPTC info. for any freeform data you might want to attach to the image. When you add a caption in Picasa, it goes into the IPTC info, and is immediately searchable. So you can put in or duplicate your "tag words" into the IPTC info, and then never worry if you lose their external tags if your database gets corrupted (because you can easily recreate the tags and tagged photos using a sort).
I therefore recommend the principle of having the photo records contain their own meta-data not only as a good data-security measure, but also because it reduces your dependence on the idiosyncrasies of any particular database system. So you can use Picasa, ACDSee, Irfanview, or whatever, to utilise the meta-data.

Hopes this all makes sense or is of use.

daddydave:
My workaround: Instead rely on the data you can store within the image file.
-IainB (July 02, 2012, 07:07 AM)
--- End quote ---

Hmm..I was naively assuming Windows 7 was doing just that. I'll need to check

What I found is that I have to add a folder to the Pictures library to get a proper "Arrange by Tag" option.

And thanks for the warning!!

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