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.