Need a guide to the confusion of adding tags or comments

[TSheppard]

Hi everyone, I've been trying to work out how to do what should be a basic task but have found the TP Help to be very unhelpful as it only talks about commands and doesn't explain much about when and how to use them for useful processes. Can anyone point me at a proper guide, or give an overview? I'm using Thumbs Plus 8.

I'd like to insert keywords into my JPG camera files, and then be able to do searches to find relevant photos. I don't want the file dates to be changed, and hopefully the JPGs won't be re-encoded.

I don't want to rely only on the TP database, because if I end up moving or reorganising my photos, especially onto a new computer, the database may not keep track. But I'm happy to use TP

As I searched the Help I came across multiple options, but no real guide to their contexts, pros, cons, etc. So far I've found stuff on user comments, exif comments, tags, IPTC, keywords, etc. And also various ways to copy or extract words from certain of these into others.

I'd like TP to help me with keeping a list of keywords that I use, so that I can re-use them easily and accurately, hopefully from a drop-down list or auto-completion, and apply them in batches as I go through my photos. And if I can do combined searches on multiple keywords that would be helpful too.

To me, this is Tagging, but TP talks about keywords separately, and also comments containing keywords, so I really don't know where to start. I have many thousands of photos and don't want to embark on a task that locks me into a dead-end or under-featured approach in the future.

I imagine this is a common issue, so perhaps TP Help could provide a tutorial giving recommended approaches, and explaining the differences in all these terms?

Many thanks for any help!

[Daan van Rooijen]

Hi -- I'm too busy for a full reply to your questions, but in brief, here's what you can do:

- Get ThumbsPlus v7 sp2, which has a full-featured IPTC editor. Maybe if you contact Cerious Software's Laura Shook (lshook@cerious.com) she'll agree to give you a discounted or free 'downgrade' license. Note: TP7 does not support Unicode in filenames etc, so if that should be a requirement, this is not going to work.

TP7 sp2 can be downloaded from http://www.cerious.com/archive.shtml.

-In TP7, go to Options | Preferences | General and turn ON the option "Retain original file date/time when quick process turning or editing IPTC."

- Assign database keywords to your images using Ctrl-K (which will build a drop-down list). To assign multiple keywords at once, separate them with semicolons, for example: "rabbit;goat;cow" (no spaces!).

- If you want TP to automatically generate other database keywords when files are thumbnailed, see Options | Preferences | Keywords for various options.

- If you want to edit your keyword list, see File | Database | Edit Keywords

- When you have assigned database keywords to your files, it's time to move them into the IPTC headers of the image files themselves. Select the files, press Ctrl-I to invoke the IPTC editor. From its menu, choose Keywords | Combine with database. Then press OK. This will copy the database keywords into the IPTC headers of your image files (JPG, TIFF or PNG), without recompressing them.

You could do your entire collection of files this way. However, for new files that you add in the future, you may want to reverse the order, and add keywords to them through the IPTC editor, which TP7 can automatically copy into the database through the relevant setting in Options | Preferences | Keywords. That way be an efficient method that still keeps your in-file and in-database keywords synched.

- To search for keywords (database keywords -- in-file keywords can't be searched), use Edit | Find by Query | tab:Keyword.

I hope this helps.

[mschnell]

In any case, you _should_ use the database for managing the files.

TP (7, and AFAIK, 9) does synchronize the "Annotation" in the database and the "Caption" in the files "EXIF" information, so that both include that information.

The even more useful criteria such as "Keyword" and "Gallery" are only stored in the database.

Moving the database from pone PC to another is no real problem. Of course at best you store the database (and picture files) on a network  server, if you intend to use multiple PCs.

-Michael

[Daan van Rooijen]

> The even more useful criteria such as "Keyword" and "Gallery" are only stored in the database.

Keywords can be saved in the (JPG, PNG, TIFF) image files themselves as IPTC information, as per my earlier message. It's quite easy to do with TP7.