A few months ago, I was looking for something to tag my images. I have a huge collection of images and I was getting sick and tired looking for the ones I wanted.

First, I tagged them with IrfanView. This was extremely cumbersome. To tag an image, you have to do the following:

Press I to open the Image Properties window



Press I to open the IPTC Information window

Click Keywords to enter keywords

Repeat this process for every image for every folder spread out over God knows what drives.

It became impossible to keep track of commonly used tags, because you have to remember them, even if you use a Word document to keep track.

Next, I tried XnView. This basically had the same problems. Yes, it’s an image manager, but tagging is still hard. It has a commonly used tag list, which is great. Buuut I have a lot of tags, and it becomes impossible to categorize them. Worse still, not all images can be tagged! XnView can only save tags in IPTC or EXIF (JPG tags), it can’t tag PNG or GIF.

And then there was Picasa. An image manager made by Google, who wants to make everything searchable? Yes please!

But oh no, this had problems of its own.

Search sucks

For a Google product, this is extremely surprising. As an example, these are the tags (“labels” in the Dutch version) for my wallpaper folder:

This is a work in progress, I haven’t even tagged 1% yet. What I do is tag everything with “later” and “wallpaper” (select everything, add tag). Then I went through it and tagged them either as “widescreen” or “normal”. When I’m done tagging an image, I remove “later”.

And now the problem: the folder contains 538 images. 538 of those are tagged as “wallpaper”. 342 are tagged as “widescreen”. 193 are tagged as “normal”. 342 + 193 = 535. Uh-oh, I missed three!

Luckily I can search for images that are tagged with “wallpaper” but NOT “widescreen” or “normal”. Oh wait, no I can’t. I can search for “wallpaper widescreen”, which will give me all widescreen wallpapers and I can search for “wallpaper normal”, which will give me all normal wallpapers. That’s not helpful at all!

What I would like is more logical operations in the search function:

NOT: the image doesn’t contain “this”

OR: the image contains “this” or “that”

AND: the image contains “this” and “that”

XOR: the image contains “this” or “that” but not both

This is especially infuriating when I’ve added a bunch of new images to the folder. Now I have to go through all of them to see which ones aren’t tagged yet!

The tagging buttons

In theory, this is a very useful feature:

These are called “quick tags”, you have ten of them. Instead of typing something in, you can just click on one of these. You can also have the bottom three represent your three most commonly used tags.

I have over 50 commonly used tags, spread out over multiple topics.

There are no hotkeys for these buttons, it’s mouse only.

There is no option to change the amount of buttons.

Even if you like the commonly used tags thing, there are only three of them.

What I would like to see instead:

A hierarchical tree of tags, separated by category: wallpapers, photographs, funny, etc.

Keep the commonly used tags, but assign them to all 10 buttons

Assign hotkeys for select tags; how about Ctrl+<numberkey>?

Misspellings are saved

Say you misspelled wallpaper as “wallpapur”. Now when you type in “wal” you get “wallpapur” as well.

Whoopsie-daisy! I guess I’ll search for it, remove it and everything will be fine? Nope, it’s still in there. Only when you restart the program is the tag database updated.

The database is stored on the C drive

And it can only be changed using a hack! My C drive is almost filled, so I wanted to move the database to the F drive. You can’t! You have to move the files to a different location and make a symbolic link to it. This suggests the location of the database is hardcoded!

Conlcusion

Picasa is a great program, but its tagging capabilities seem tacked on. Maybe I’m just using it wrong. ;)