In the Feb-Mar 2004 issue, I wrote about backing up your digital photographs (“Digital photography – A generation is losing its heritage”). You can read it at www.kyber.biz/rants. In the article I recommended ThumbsPlus software for organizing photos.
ThumbsPlus is still a good program, but I have found something better: Picasa. Not just a Web site for sharing pictures, Picasa is also a program that runs on your PC. You can download it free from Google. Picasa catalogs all the photos on your hard drive, and makes it very easy to display and sort through them.
It’s so comprehensive and easy to use, that it is a common experience to discover images on your PC that you had completely forgotten about.
Picasa is great for many reasons. First, it allows you to add keywords and captions to your photos. Both the keywords and the captions are embedded in the image itself, instead of being stored in a separate file. Most digital cameras store photos as “JPG” files (short for Joint Photographic Experts Group). This standard allows for “meta-tags” or extra information to be stored in the file. It’s not part of the image, rather it’s about the image. Ex: date and time the photo was taken, shutter speed, f-stop, make & model of camera, etc. There are two types of tags: EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), and IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council).
When you add keywords or captions, they are stored as IPTC tags within the JPG file. The reason this is very important is that when you copy or backup your photos, the comments stay with the photos. If you spend many hours meticulously documenting your photos, you don’t want to lose your work because you forgot, or didn’t know, how to back up the auxiliary files. I believe that iPhoto (Apple) stores captions in separate files, which is not a good thing.
Once you have added captions or keywords to your photos, you can quickly filter them by entering a search word. Just enter “Fifi” and all pictures (and only the pictures) containing you pooch will appear. Picasa also filters based on the name of the file.
What is the difference between a keyword and a caption? A keyword is not displayed when you view the photo. A caption appears at the bottom of the photo. Keywords are stored as separate tokens or words. A caption is a single sentence. Keywords can be assigned to multiple photos simultaneoulsy. Captions are assigned one at a time. Keywords have “type-ahead” (where the computer guesses what you want based on the first few characters). Captions must be copied & pasted from one photo to the next.
For example, you might have a hundred photos of Sunday’s pic-nic at Crystal beach. You would use captions to record the names of the people in each photo. But, you could select all the photos, and enter the keywords “pic-nic”, “Crystal”, “beach”. This would enable you to select all pic-nic photos.
Personally I use captions almost exclusively, because I kill two birds with one stone: I create captions that viewers can read, and they also work as search terms. I use keywords occasionally to add search terms that would be awkward in the caption.
Picasa allows you to create “albums”, containing a subset or extract of your photos. The photo files are not duplicated, which saves space. An album can be burned onto a CD, converted to an HTML presentation, or uploaded to the Web.
Picasa is also a Web-based picture-sharing site. Once you have captioned your photos, you can upload them to the Picasa Web site, and send the URL to friends & family for their enjoyment. Google gives you 1 GB (1,000 MB) free. That’s about 3,000 pictures at fairly good resolution.
My son-in-law in Toronto keeps rich and up-to-date albums of my grandson, the amazing Oliver. I am very grateful to him and my daughter for keeping in touch this way.
I recently became acquainted with a long-lost niece who had been adopted. I promptly digitized forty years’ worth of negatives, added captions, and was able to select all the photos of my late brother, her father. I uploaded them to Picasa (you can have private albums as well as public). She is now seeing, for the first time, what her father looked like.
Now comes the really neat part.
ThumbsPlus can be configured to extract the text of a caption, and display it as text, superimposed on the photo. You can then print the photo, with the caption included!
This is a subtle point. When you view the captions in Picasa (either the desktop or Web version), the captions appear underneath the photo. Only through its special functions can Picasa retrieve and display the caption.
What ThumbsPlus does is display the caption as a bunch of pixels, in the bottom left-hand corner, for example. The text is part of the photo. This is important because it’s the only way you’re going to get the caption to appear on a piece of photographic paper printed at WalMart.
ThumbsPlus can do this in batch mode, thousands of files at a time. You would probably want to do this on a copy of the photo, to avoid permanently altering the original.
ThumbsPlus offers many options: the size, font, point size and color of the text. The position, and the type of blending (exclusive OR, etc). This last option guarantees that the text will always be visible whether the background is light or dark.
So what are you waiting for!? Start captioning today. It’s addictive, and future generations will thank you!