The saga to find a photo tag/search tool
As a long time computer user (nerd? - even designed and built
my own computer, including the BIOS in the 80's)
I have been aware for a long
time of the issues in finding files and the effort and pain this costs. This issue has been growing fast in
recent times with the explosion of storage and the number of files.
I've been a
long time "home" user of many tools to search and find files, content in files,
and suffering the pain of trying to find items (online and offline) for many
years, especially as a heavy user (and the whole family as well) we accumulate
extreme amounts of data, and as we never quite implemented a good "system" we
end up with duplicated content, because we're not quite sure what we backed up
last time, or the time before, and we're never game to through anything out, and
.....
At work, I've also implemented and used
desktop search, records and asset management systems, large web site search
system, been part of projects working on large scale video and audio (ie
multimillion $). All these are
systems about managing and finding content/things/stuff.
Finally after years of wanting and looking
around, we bought a digital camera. Middle of the range with mix of functions,
and not too bad (and not that good either) movie function.
We have used it a fair bit and liked it. We
were aware of the need to manage and find the photos, but still just enjoying
the transition to instant digital photos and the freedom to take as many photos
when we wanted, without worrying about the cost and time delays to see the
outcome. WONDERFUL STUFF!
Then had a holiday overseas at fairly short
notice, not much time to organise and prepare, so decided to take advantage of
overseas prices and get software to help manage the photos while on holiday.
So based on my "super expert" background, I
just had in my head, some Simple Goals (that's what I thought!)
- Preferably less than US$50 - based on knowledge that popular
photo tools around this value
- Ease of bulk tagging
- Refining tags
- Future proof (
Vista is coming, also lots of movement in the
industry about better ways to do this)
- Good search
- Basic features to download files and automatically give
them more sensible names
- Only interested in a few basic photo touch up features,
maybe a bit of editing
- NOT interested in advanced photo editing (I'm not
capable?)
- Just interested in
files from our camera (jpg and mov)
I had other features like archiving in the
'back of my mind', but was not actively looking for these.
I even had a couple of the popular tools in
mind and had even played with them in past years.