Right in front of me all this time

I’ve been looking for the perfect photo categorization tool for quite a while. Heck, i’d settle for a half-bad one! Many times i’ve thought about writing my own. Some have come close, but have missed that one (or two or..) important feature which i really needed.

I’ve been using Picasa on and off for quite a while, and have been happy with it, especially for printing, but not totally investing in it, because i thought it lacked that one important feature.

What feature is that, you ask? Well, i store all our photos on a server in the basement, so we can see them from any computer in the house. I really don’t want to start adding meta-data into the photos unless it can be shared by all possible users. I thought Picasa used its own internal database to store all its info. I’ve since learned that this is not correct. This post explains that pretty much everything other then albums is stored either in the jpg itself (keywords) or in hidden files kept in the directory on the server.

I can’t believe that its that easy. Sure, there are things about Picasa which aren’t ideal, but, man, this is great news! I’ve very excited to finally (finally!!!) invest some time in tagging my photos, and having them searchable.

I’m not sure if i’m excited about google’s flickr service, but the fact that it is integrated so nicely into Picasa makes it very tempting, even though i’m pretty hard-core about keeping stuff on my own site.

So, in the end, the solution has been on my hard-drive for several years! Gods. Well, you learn a new thing every day.