Image management

[HowlinPreacherMan]

Hi all–

What do you use for image management? Picasa, something else?

I’d like something that’ll allow me to add copyright info and maybe watermarks.

I poked around with Picasa a while ago, and I’m gonna get the latest version and look at it but I wanted to see what everyone else uses.

Thanks.

[Curious]

i do mine manually but others may not. it’s a holiday weekend and several of the regulars have mentioned being out of pocket until tuesday. be patient if you don’t get a reply you can use right away.

[Analogy]

I’d like some software that could let me mass add watermarks to images too. I don’t think Picasa does it.

[Claff]

When I do web albums I do it with Picasa. It’s not fancy but it works, doing thumbnails automagically and links for “next pic” and “previous pic” – which I could do manually in HTML but now I don’t have to.

I do watermarks manually in Photoshop. When I do web albums it’s sually only 50ish pics at a time at the most so it’s not a huge chunk of time to add the watermark after doing all the other processing.

[Analogy]

Yeah I do all my web album stuff wtih Picasa too, though I’m thinking of starting to do it with Flickr because, well, everybody uses Flickr. We’ll see I guess.

As for manually watermarking, ugh. Photoshop isn’t part of my regular workflow, I use DxO for all my image selection and color management. The idea of going in and watermarking hundreds of images… *shudder* manually makes me cry. I want to spend the absolute least amount of time post producing my pics as possible so I can get back to shooting.

[sleeping]

If you have photoshop, you can automate this sort of thing, to an extent: First record the steps for the watermark as an action, then you can use File > Automate > Batch to run the action on, say, a folder with all the files you want to watermark in it.

[schnee]

I want to spend the absolute least amount of time post producing my pics as possible so I can get back to shooting.

Tape the watermark to the front element of your lens and do it in camera. Problem solved.

/not really – my image management technique consists of asking “now, where did I file that?” over and over.

[HowlinPreacherMan]

my image management technique consists of asking “now, where did I file that?” over and over.

That’s what I’m doing now, and on 3 computers… it’s getting old.

/gotta go look for some transparencies for my watermark

Thanks for the idea folks!

[Analogy]

Tape the watermark to the front element of your lens and do it in camera. Problem solved.

Haw. I’d need to shoot everything at f/32 to get it in focus.

Maybe if I tape it to the sensor. That totally won’t cause any problems.

[XenPix]

I use Gallery on my website, which adds watermarks, resizes, that kind of thing. If I want to add a watermark and am feeling oh so lazy, I just upload them to the site. Then I can ftp in and save them all back.

I am the Queen of Lazy. 😉

[monkeybort]

I use bridge/photoshop for everything right now. once i update Roger (my computer) i’m going to upgrade to Lightroom and really get this whole RAW workflow thing i keep hearing about figured out. 🙂 my signature is added in photoshop, plus i add a copyright notice to my metadata. I think in the flickr photoshop group there is a tutorial on making an action for a watermark.

[olavf]

So, the ‘making the switch’ thread has had me thinking…

just kat and I have between us thousands of pictures and now that my son has expressed an interest in coming along with us on photo safaris, I expect this number to grow exponentially. Right now, we’ve got a samba share on the server that has everything organized by date – folders for the year and then yymmdd format within that with additional folder name tags such as ‘farktography-contest’ or ‘Christmas’ or what have you, and the person’s initial. Even still, this is getting really, really unruly, and difficult to deal with – there’s 22 folders for December alone :/ I’m coming to the realization that what we need around here is some sort of digital/photo management software to keep everything straight, and to be able to actually find that picture I know I took of XXX back in ’05…

What are people using for photo management nowadays? I’ve spent the afternoon looking around on the web, and have been having a helluva time finding anything that really fits where we are – ‘serious hobbyists’ if you will – without getting into the pro level software. And what with everything else going on right now I can’t fork out a couple of hundred bucks to get three seats of anything up and running. Is there anything out there open source that would preferably run on both Win and Linux systems? I looked at Bluemarine (http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/) and it seems nice on the surface, but is crap for it’s RAW handling abilities at the moment, and I’d really rather not convert everything to TIFF to be able to use it’s features for the foreseeable future.

tl;dr: What are folks using for image management software these days? open source, win+gnome and tagging preferred.

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