http://norman.walsh.name/2006/07/16/managingPhotographs 9 69 2006-07-16T19:43:23-04:00 $Date: 2006-07-16 20:01:31 -0400 (Sun, 16 Jul 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh What do you use to manage your digital photo collection? Michael Sperberg-McQueen The problem with ad hoc solutions is that they so often turn out to be odd hack solutions. I do my best to keep my photo collection organized. I keep track of when photos were taken, I extract metadata from the photographs so that I could, in theory, perform interesting queries, I often (but not often enough) add information about where they were taken, what event they document, who's in them, etc. But my best isn't really good enough. Plus, I've got on the order of ten thousand photographs that, for all intents and purposes, have no meaningful metadata. Adding that metadata with any efficiency is going to require application help. I'm not the only one with this problem. What do you do about it? I'm sure there are lots more Windows options (and Mac options, I suppose) than there are Linux ones. Yeah, well, I'm still not giving up my Linux box, thank you very much. I just tried F-spot, which I think has a lot of potential, but it seems to sort images based on the date/time stamp of the file, not the EXIF date/time stamp and it didn't handle my raw images. (And where does it store it's data, anyway?) I wonder if this is the rails application I need to write? Or maybe the lazy web will come to my rescue.