ExifTool GUI

[clevertomato]

I have been frustrated for a long time with the lack of proper Linux tools to tag photos. I don't just mean comments and keywords. The best I've found is DigiKam, but I don't want to put up with KDE libs (I've tried and almost gave in). It's a great app and I'm impressed, but I don't want to use it.

I like RawTherapee but I can't select 100 photos of my dog and tag them with "dog"... only one at a time (and only IPTC).

I've tried jbrout, gthumb, f-spot, etc. No good for what I'm after.

Mapivi is sort of close in tagging, but its UI is very awkward.

I noticed there is software called ExifTool GUI but it is only for Windows! All I'm after is a GUI for Exiftool that allows me to SEE my photos in order to know how I want to tag them. Then of course I want to tag multiple photos simultaneously. That's it! I'll use RawTherapee or Darktable for image manipulation.

Does anyone have any ideas? Are there any developers out there that have thought of doing this relatively small project. I think it would be well-received and would not compete with Darktable, DigiKam, or RawTherapee. It would be a great compliment to other photo software tools.

Exiftool is simply amazing, but I can't rate photos or assign keywords and captions to photos without seeing them.

...just a simple exiftool gui.

[clevertomato]

I've since tried digiwf which is based on the work of xmp manager. I tested it on Karmic and it seemed like it had potential, although it is very limited; however, it would not work on Lucid (causes a seg fault related to ruby).

I don't understand why there's no equivalent to Exiftool Gui for Windows: http://freeweb.siol.net/hrastni3/fot...xiftoolgui.htm That is exactly what I need. It seems a real shame to have to dual boot or VM into Windows just for a relatively simple GUI for exiftool.

Anyone have any comments to add? Agree? Anyone thought about developing this for Linux?

[ottadini]

I suppose Shotwell is not any use to you - as tags are stored in the iptc metadata rather than exif.
apart from that though it does what you want - view and tag multiple files at once, very nice gui.

[clevertomato]

Shotwell does have a decent GUI and apparently "tags" (with keywords) multiple photos. I don't know if it does it's own thing with my photo files and directories like F-spot, but if it does, that's a mark against it in my book. Regarding metadata, let me explain a bit how so many apps fall short (I'm no expert but I've been studying the standards)...

EXIF is essentially metadata generated by the camera not meant to be edited (generally).

IPTC (metatdata standard) was defined by the IPTC (organization) in 1979. Yes, 1979. But even it has more tags (i.e. Headline, Caption, City, State, Country) than simply "keywords" which most photo apps limit themselves to.

XMP is a metadata standard defined in 2001. It's the modern, improved method of storing metadata and has many possible tags besides just keywords. It's much more robust than IPTC... such that the IPTC (organization) is even merging the IPTC (metadata standard) into the XMP structure.

So what I don't understand is why so many photo apps--even new ones--are limiting themselves to tagging in IPTC only (at best), and many limit themselves to only "keywords." IPTC is over 30 years old and XMP has been defined for 10 years. How long does it take for developers to start integrating modern metadata standards? It's not like XMP is bleeding edge. It's 10 years old.

Exiftool by Phil Harvey kicks tail. It does it all... and more. BUT, it's pretty hard to identify which photos you want to tag with "fish, aquarium, freshwater, blue" without being able to see the photos (it's a command line only tool). Someone wrote an excellent front-end for Exiftool for Windows, but nobody seems interested in doing that for Linux.

[boardhead]

So what I don't understand is why so many photo apps--even new ones--are limiting themselves to tagging in IPTC only (at best), and many limit themselves to only "keywords." IPTC is over 30 years old and XMP has been defined for 10 years. How long does it take for developers to start integrating modern metadata standards? It's not like XMP is bleeding edge. It's 10 years old.

Yes, but XMP is notoriously difficult to parse. To address this problem, Adobe released their XMP toolkit 2 years ago. I haven't used it, but I could imagine that it sucks just as much as XMP. Also, it works only on a limited set of systems in a limited set of development environments.

Exiftool by Phil Harvey kicks tail. It does it all... and more.

Thanks.

- Phil

[LingLing]

hi there,
I've been looking for a photo-tagging GUI tool for ubuntu for quite a while now, too.
I've been using Sagittarius for a few months now, but it's really only in alpha-stage and crashes a lot. And since 11.04 I wasn't able to find it anymore at all.

XMP-Manager looks interesting, is still in development though too:
http://grigio.org/xmp_manager

[LingLing]

I have just found the solution after months of searching for a good tool to do the job:


It's callde geeqie

It's a very nice and fast image viewer with lots of functionality and it writes XMP and IPTC whatever you want.

[steve7777777]

I have just found the solution after months of searching for a good tool to do the job:


It's called geeqie

It's a very nice and fast image viewer with lots of functionality and it writes XMP and IPTC whatever you want.

Great! I'll check it out tonight.

[Andrew_P]

I have just found the solution after months of searching for a good tool to do the job:
It's called geeqie.
It's a very nice and fast image viewer with lots of functionality and it writes XMP and IPTC whatever you want.

Its correct name is Geeqie Image Viewer and it is a fork from GQview. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/geeqie/.

You can also find a compiled package in the Canonical repositories:

sudo apt-get install geeqie

It also installs UFRaw, needed to manipulate RAW image metadata, which it calls from the GUI via UFRaw's command line interface. Using the same mechanism, it can call other utilities, such as GIMP, gThumb, etc. If you have no immediate use for UFRaw, you can uncheck it in System > Preferences > Main Menu so it's still there for Geeqie, but doesn't clutter your menu.

[Rebelli0us]

Geeqie works, you can install from Ubuntu Software center.