The saga to find a photo tag/search tool

Problem solved?

So while on holidays I started tagging the thousands of photos we were taking with two of the most popular tools.

These did a pretty good job. I could create structures of tags and apply them to the photos and search and find the photos.

No - it was not. Because I wanted to future proof the effort and the data to ensure that it could fairly easily, or at least with a bit of script/programming move to whatever happens in the future. There was also the unstated need I had about being able to move files with the data.

I as thought more about this (this is what I should have done in the up front requirements analysis) I discovered some more requirements, some that were in the back of my mind ¨- but not stated, some new, and a couple that are up to the user - not the tool:

Tags to move with the files - eg when sending to family/friends, or to cater for all those computing stuff ups where files get moved/changed via the file system, or use a new photo tool(s) in the future, .... While these tools offered ways to do this, they tended to be restrictive, often quite restrictive in my view.
Tags to move with the files - this also means that tags are embedded using a standard(s), which increases the ease of other people/systems reading the data, and the length of time for which standards are supported is also a big plus in the future proofing need.
Only being able to edit tags within the ONE program using a proprietary format is very restrictive and for someone very used to using the flexibility of doing the same task in the most convenient way, this is extremely restrictive and lead to MANY MANY mistakes. For example as the number of photos grew, I kept refining my file storage structure. Naturally I re-organised the files using the file manager - but this broke the links between the photos and their tags in the software tools. I did this several times.
Very very important to have a workflow, structured keywords, and support of these in your tool(s)
Very very important to USE your workflow - this takes discipline and effort!!!

These last two items are really important, as without these NO TOOL is going to be of much help.

Now armed with some better knowledge, I knew that I wanted support of EXIF, IPTC and XMP standards, to allow me to hedge my bets as to which standard would "be the one" in future. These were not ideal, but seemed to be the way forward.

Slowly it became more and more apparent that I had fallen for the standard trap in computing not properly defining my needs (requirements).

I had also made some fatal assumptions, which did not really become evident for many many months:

I assumed that as a computing professional my ¡°expert¡± knowledge that I knew what I was doing and that I knew what I wanted.
I assumed terminology (see my definitions below)
I assumed that professional software out of my price range (even at overseas prices)
I assumed that asset/records management software would be WAY out of my price range and too restrictive etc for home use. This was probably an unconscious assumption

All of these assumptions have caused me a lot of chasing in the wrong directions, in fact I continued searching for months after our holiday still not finding anything I liked. I even started looking at development and looked a few tools not were that easy (for me) or met all my needs.

The best tool that I found was part of a larger suite that was around US$1,000 - way out of my budget and the demo would not last forever. I also thought it had a few limitations in keyword hierarchy, which later I found was not correct. This also is a bit of a common theme were I have hastily looked at some programs and not always discovered all the features.

The next best tool I found was very a powerful tag only tool, but it had to used as a command line tool, or development your own interface - and it was a language I struggle with. So I eventually wrote a VB program in Excel (just because I had run out of space and de-installed my dev tools to make room for photos!), that was a wrapper on the command line tool. That worked fairly well for the initial bulk tagging, although a bit slow.

As part of this I had also researched and developed my own workflow and also a "controlled vocabulary" - which is just a limited set of keywords and structure which if known at search time, make it MUCH MUCH easier to find the content. So with the bulk tagging tool and a search tool like Picasa, I had a good start, but it was clunky and very hard to individually refine the tags and ratings.