Tagging photographs

[Nonno Bassotto]

I am trying to organize my photographs with tags. The last time I have been doing this was about three years ago, so I have a lot of pictures to organize.

All of the photographs should have correct EXIF tags for the time they were shot. I want to manually add tags for the people appearing in the photos.

My requirements are simple. Labels should be stored inside the photos themselves, in the form of IPTC or XMP tags, and it should be easy to do mass tagging, say by selecting a bunch of photos and adding a common tag. Since this task is mostly visual, I'd rather not use command line tools. If possible, I would like to have the timing of the shot copied from EXIF to ITPC or XMP, in order to have all tags in the same format.

I have been trying to use Shotwell for this, but it is rather annoying. Shotwell wants me to import all the photos before being able to tag them, and this makes it difficult to go folder by folder and tag the pictures. It would be easier for me to tag the pictures beforehand and only then copy them into my main photo folder, which is where Shotwell looks for new pictures.

Are there any good tools to tag photos? I would need something like an EasyTag equivalent.

[winh8r]

Firstly, there is nothing wrong with your English! Perfectly readable and understandable, if you hadn't mentioned it I would have assumed it was your first language!!!

Anyway, I believe that digiKam will do what you need, it is a digital photo management suite built for KDE , but it is available in the Ubuntu Repositories/Software Centre, that is the one major drawback though, unless you are using the KDE desktop environment installing digiKam will require you to install a whole lot of other KDE related stuff with it.

Here is a link to the website for you to have a look:
http://www.digikam.org/drupal/about?q=about/features

If you decide to give it a go just install it through the Software Centre or Synaptic Package Manager.

I hope that this will be of some help to you.

[Nonno Bassotto]

Thank you for your reply. I would prefer a Gnome tool, in order to avoid installing all of KDE, but if you ensure me that DigiKam does not need me to import the photos, I will consider it as well.

[x-shaney-x]

You can use shotwell to import photos "in-place" can you not?
That means they will be imported into the database but stay in the original folder you had them in, rather than moving them to a folder.