Best photo management software?

Question

What I would like is a single piece of software (or a smart combination of tools) that allow me to manage my photos in a better way than what I've found so far.

1. Tags Primarily I need a way of tagging the images. So I can manually tag photos the same way we tag questions here at SO/SF/SU. I want this software to place a lot of the tags automagically (obvious things like date and resolution).

2. Face recognition What I would really like is that this software has a feature that it can recognize faces in images and places tags with the name of the person. So far I've only heard of one online photo system that can do that (Picasa) and not yet of any offline tool.

3. Version database I must have some way of having a central GIT/SVN/... that contains all images. I have had a harddrive corruption a few years ago and it took me a long time to figure out which images had been damaged. I always want to be able to go back to what the camera produced.

4. Website I want to be able to generate a website (few 'tag' specific websites) based on the actual content.

5. Easy bulk uploading Many photo tools have a one on one uploading option. I prefer simply 'throwing' my images on a file server under Linux (Samba) and let the system automagically integrate, tag, recognize, etc. all images.

Ok, I know these are a bit much. Perhaps you guy's have some suggestions about existing tools that can make this possible. Or even a complete system that does this.

EDIT: To clarify on the OS. I prefer Linux for any 'server' task and Windows XP for any 'desktop' task.

Thanks for all your input.

Niels Basjes

Answer 1

• Picasa supports tags and easy uploading. Apparently there should be some form of facial recognition as well, but I think it's only on the online version.
• Flickr might help you getting them on a website in categories and also has facial recognition.

One single app? No can do...

• Facebook has some form of facial recognition, but isn't an app and people comment that they don´t like it :P

Answer 2

Picasa does quite a bit of what you asked for, however it's not a powerful enough editor for my tastes and doesn't have RAW support (last I checked).

I personally use Adobe Lightroom along with my own backup scheme to keep everything managed. I'd love it if they added face recognition, but they're not quite there yet.

On the Mac side (fwiw) iPhoto actually does a shocking number of the things you listed.

Answer 3

It may not be popular, but Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery does almost everything you're looking for, including local face recognition. Click through the list of features in the left navigation.

Answer 4

I use Digikam to manage a collection of about 47,000 photos spanning over 20 years (the oldest ones are scanned film, of course). I use it on Linux, but it also runs on OSX and Windows. As it happens, I just installed version 2.5 (a huge upgrade from the Debian-provided 1.9) and put it through its paces last night. This program is immense — I may very well be missing some new features.

Tags: you can tag with hierarchical tags. I haven't found automated tags yet, but you may not need them. If you need to search for images of a particular resolution, you can use the advanced search (and save it as a preset filter so you can easily filter your images any time you like). If you positively need image resolution tags, apply the filter, select all, then apply a tag to the result. Digikam stores images metadata like tags in a standard database (SQLite or MySQL), either of which you can manipulate with pretty much any language or DB tool you want. You could write a script to add these tags automatically.

Also, if you use tags as a substitute of an image search feature (like on Flickr), you should have a look at the search facility of this thing. You can draw a rough kindergarten-style image representing your photo, and it'll find it (while you draw). I stopped adding 20 or 30 tags to each image when they added that, and the search features on version 2.5 seem even better.

Face recognition: it's there, it works. It's not blindingly fast, but I ran it on my laptop (and on the aforementioned 47,000 image collection, so you can imagine the horror). I think it uses normal tags (under a Person parent tag) to store the tagged names, which makes it very versatile for searching and filtering.

Versioning: I didn't see that, but this may not be what you want. Versioning of binary files isn't particularly efficient (you can't really run diff on binaries) and the repository would become immense very quickly (each revision of a 20-meg raw file may take the full 20 megs). I'd humbly suggest rethinking your workflow to never modify/remove the original material, and just create alternate versions with modified filenames. And backups. Update: it apparently does do versioning in version 2.5.

Website: Digikam does that, I think I've used it in the past. In the far past, too, so presumably it'd be better at it now. You can also upload/download/sync to a couple of dozen online services and devices. Depending on the source/target, some/all image metadata will be transferred too. It depends on the service or device, of course.

Bulk Uploading: I have it setup so that it automatically transfers photos to a Albums/yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd directory, but it can bulk import photos from anything accessible via the network, via pretty much any protocol (note: this may be more flexible under KDE than under Windows). It can also just access the image files remotely and keep the metadata locally, if you want. The reason I went to Digikam in the first place is it seemed the only program that could handle collections this big. Most seemed to be geared towards someone with a couple of hundred images in a handful of folders.

Answer 5

Just for a record ACDSee Photo Manager is a pretty decent piece of software that would meet most of your conditions; apart from the face recognition I think. I used it in the past and found it fast and easy to use

Answer 6

Check out IDimager. Version 5 (currently in beta) adds face recognition. All the rest of your bases are covered.

Answer 7

Here I found a recent article about ACDSee Photo Manager 12 but I think it still does not have a face recognition option.

Answer 8

Picasa does exactly what you want. Throw all of your photos on a Linux server (raid1) and enable samba. Run Picasa on an XP box and I think you get it all.