RPTools.net

Like most people, I have collected too many pretty pictures that might be useful one day.
I have hunted for a decent image collection management tool, and have yet to find one that suits my Maptool needs.
Presently everything is organised (poorly) in directories.

Images contain additional information, similar to id3 on mp3 files. I want to be able to use and edit this extra information with multiple tags such as Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Town, Monster, Elf, Isometric, ©SomeGuy, whatever.

All the software I have found so far maintains its own database of tags and does not store the information on the image files themselves. I want each image to have suitable categories stored on it directly.

Then I want a library application that allows me to edit the tags, in batches & singly; as well as view, sort, filter, and select all the images I have collected.

Transport
Modern
Aircraft
Rotary Wing
Military
... ooh Apache .... drag and drop ... eat this suckers

It's not like I am asking for very much

Reverend

interesting... I can certainly see the merit of this. I guess the main issue is with the file format. With .mp3 there is a tag container in the file format where you can store your tags, however with a .wav you can forget about that. Its quite likely that for images this is the same, there will be image files (i guess .psd) that have these containers and ones that won't (jpg?). And if the file format does not support this, then I guess no software will be able to something with that.
Ultimately I think you should try to find a file format that DOES support this (if any) and then look for the software

edit: after a little googling it seems that software is able to tag picture, but the method widely differs. Here are some links:
http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
http://image-tagger.sourceforge.net/

AFAIK most common meta data storage is EXIF - it works fine with JPG and TIFF but wont do well with PNG or GIF.
Especially PNG seems to have a bad metadata support in general. A pity - its my prefered file format for all MT stuff.

I could cope with having to convert all my images to formats that supported embedded metadata if necessary. EXIF does seem quite limited; XMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXtensible ... a_Platform) sounds like the thing to go for as it appears it can be added to PNG, GIF and a bunch of others.

CoveredInFish wrote:PNG ... its my prefered file format

^ This.

Honestly, this is a job for your OS, not an external application. Not sure about Mac, but I know WIndows 7 has this feature built in. Ubuntu does not as far as I can tell from a "REAL" quick glance on my home machine. Honestly, the OS needs to manage this and expose an API for dealing with it. Then ANY application, be in C++, Java, .Net based or what have you can quickly and easily query for what they want. Kind of like a file open dialog on steroids.

True. But on the other hand ... as long as the OS doesnt solve this well - and I think none is doing thos right in terms of usability - an application could help.

The best/closest thing I have found to what I want is (unfortunately) the MS Photo Gallery, but it isn't really up to scratch. It also suffers from not being cross-OS. From the outside, what I am looking for is not an overly complex application at its most basic. No doubt it could be made complex.

If the initial version only dealt with a couple of image formats, it should be relatively easy to get off the ground.

ImageTool will have uses for pretty much anyone that manages lot of images. The broader community has much use for this application. Think also of the exposure that MapTool will get when everyone discovers it.

Waiting for someone else to do it hasn't worked. There are some quite polished and finished pieces of gallery software out there that have been developed over a substantial period of time, and they still don't do what is needed. There may not be enough demand for commercial developers to bother with. Thus, we need to inject a file manager with steroids ourselves.

So. How do we go about it?

Rev

The ability to add XMP to image files would be a huge UI investment on the part of MT.

The ability to recognize XMP embedded inside an image and to display user-selected fields from the XMP data might not be so far-fetched. For instance, the user could choose to display columns for image name, WxH, number of colors, and so on. Then extracting that information might not be too difficult, although it might be kind of slow. We would want to read it and cache it, most likely, but that will consume a fair amount of RAM if each image has 400-500 bytes of XMP (like the example on the wikipedia page demonstraes).

It seems more likely that SVG should be the future for image formats. It's infinitely scalable (when the image consists of vector graphics; raster graphics will look like the do now when zoomed in), can have comments/extra elements added for metadata, and is directly viewable in any browser worth using. (Which is to say, any modern browser other than IE. )

But none of that is likely in the short term. The existing developers are very busy right now. If other community members want to tackle it, I'd be willing to review designs and implementations and make suggestions...

*sigh*

You mean I can't just palm it off for someone else to do?

Fine, I'm off to download Eclipse and learn how to program. This could take a while.
Tips and pointers may well come in handy if I get beyond "Hello World".

Rev.