Is there a way to organize photos by tagging them and saving it on external hard drive? I?

Question

I have an external hard drive where I stored ALL my digial photos. I like to start tagging them and organizing them but I'm not sure how to do that.

I know of Picasa but the problem is, I don't store my photos on my computer, there's just too many. Is there a way to put meta data on the photos and also be able to search the tag on the drive when I need a particular picture instead of going through all of them? HELP!

Answer 1

Picasa doesn't really care where your images are. By default it'll look in your "My Pictures" folder, but you can correct that misconception on its part. (Tools, Folder Manager, navigate to the folder in the tree view on the left and choose Scan Always")



Picasa stores image editing information in a picasa.ini file in each folder (so you can undo changes later). Descriptions and captions and such it stores in its own database on c:\documents and settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\db2. So you might want to backup that folder every so often.



One simple way I organize my photos, whether on an internal or external drive, is simply by date. I have a folder for each year. In folders beneath that I use the format for folders of "YYYY-MM-DD - DESCRIPTION" (year, month, day) so that they're organized chronologically. That way I can often find things without resorting to Picasa or Adobe's organizer.

Answer 2

This isn't really an answer but merely a comment.



hlkljgk and DCReed are right with their comments. However, having the same problem I find that picasa is no solution for me regarding this problem.

As hlkljgk and DCReed said, picasa is surely able to tag and manage your photos on an external harddisk. However, it will not show you the pictures when your external harddrive is not connected. (even though it seems to store the thumbnails locally).

So you are not able to tag your photos on the go via the thumbnails (or be it 800x600 thumbnails) and have the tags (+other changes) updated as soon as the external hdd is plugged into your system.

Answer 3

You can use still Picasa on your computer and save your tagged photos to the external hard drive. Picasa will look where you tell it to find tagged photos, including your external drive.



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