JPEG comment software

It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are often
called different things in different programs, and there's not much
standardisation between them. After working with a variety of different
programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library, Faststone, Irfanciew,
Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I have settled on the EXIF field
usually called "JPEG comment" to add, well, comments to my pics. Faststone
and Irfanview both call it the same thing and both can read and edit it,
which will do for me as I am comfortable with both programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me thumbnails
with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can quickly go through a
heap of images adding/amending the comments. Faststone and Irfanview are
both slow when doing a large number. A sort of Windows Explorer type of
interface with thumbnails down one side and a column for JPEG comments
(editable) would do quite well I think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably freeware?
Thanl you so much for any help.

--
Peter in New Zealand. (Email address is fake)
Collector of old cameras, tropical fish fancier, good coffee nutter, and
compulsive computer fiddler.

Peter in New Zealand wrote:
It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are often
called different things in different programs, and there's not much
standardisation between them. After working with a variety of different
programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library, Faststone, Irfanciew,
Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I have settled on the EXIF field
usually called "JPEG comment" to add, well, comments to my pics. Faststone
and Irfanview both call it the same thing and both can read and edit it,
which will do for me as I am comfortable with both programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me thumbnails
with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can quickly go through a
heap of images adding/amending the comments. Faststone and Irfanview are
both slow when doing a large number. A sort of Windows Explorer type of
interface with thumbnails down one side and a column for JPEG comments
(editable) would do quite well I think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably freeware?
Thanl you so much for any help.

I found some inconsistency in various programs, especially freeware such
that data entered in one program may not be readable in another, so be
careful. Maybe do some tests & see if it can be read with photoshop,
acdsee, exiftool, windows explorer properties, etc...

The standard for comments as I understand is not exif but IPTC which
journalists use. Although yeah exif makes more sense because that's
already got all the camera data, GPS & such.

Good luck, let us know what you find.

--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

all google groups messages filtered due to spam

"Paul Furman" wrote in message
...
Peter in New Zealand wrote:
It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are often
called different things in different programs, and there's not much
standardisation between them. After working with a variety of different
programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library, Faststone,
Irfanciew, Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I have settled on
the EXIF field usually called "JPEG comment" to add, well, comments to my
pics. Faststone and Irfanview both call it the same thing and both can
read and edit it, which will do for me as I am comfortable with both
programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me
thumbnails with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can quickly go
through a heap of images adding/amending the comments. Faststone and
Irfanview are both slow when doing a large number. A sort of Windows
Explorer type of interface with thumbnails down one side and a column for
JPEG comments (editable) would do quite well I think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably
freeware? Thanl you so much for any help.

I found some inconsistency in various programs, especially freeware such
that data entered in one program may not be readable in another, so be
careful. Maybe do some tests & see if it can be read with photoshop,
acdsee, exiftool, windows explorer properties, etc...

The standard for comments as I understand is not exif but IPTC which
journalists use. Although yeah exif makes more sense because that's
already got all the camera data, GPS & such.

Good luck, let us know what you find.

--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

all google groups messages filtered due to spam

OK, here's what I worked out. Two freeware programs that seem to handle jpeg
comments in the EXIF data in the same way are Faststone Image Viewer and
Irfanview. Any comment added or edited in one shows up fine in the other.
And Faststone has a nifty window for working on these comments, with prev
and next buttons so you can step through a series of images quite guickly,
adding/editing the comments as you go. I generally use Faststone for most
image organising/editing/etc. and fall back onto Irfanview for some more
exotic stuff.

So these will be the two I think I will stick with for now. It seems quite
long comments can be added - I don't know if there is a size limit, but the
main thing is that the comments travel with the file and are readable in
commonly available and currently "alive" software. These two programs seem
to fill all the requirements.

Thank you for your "comments" (pun intended) which are helpful as I continue
to learn all about digital photography after decades of good ol' films. I
really am just a beginner.

--
Peter in New Zealand. (Email address is fake)
Collector of old cameras, tropical fish fancier, good coffee nutter, and
compulsive computer fiddler.

Peter in New Zealand wrote:

"Paul Furman" wrote in message
...
Peter in New Zealand wrote:
It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are
often called different things in different programs, and there's not
much standardisation between them. After working with a variety of
different programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library,
Faststone, Irfanciew, Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I
have settled on the EXIF field usually called "JPEG comment" to add,
well, comments to my pics. Faststone and Irfanview both call it the
same thing and both can read and edit it, which will do for me as I
am comfortable with both programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me
thumbnails with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can
quickly go through a heap of images adding/amending the comments.
Faststone and Irfanview are both slow when doing a large number. A
sort of Windows Explorer type of interface with thumbnails down one
side and a column for JPEG comments (editable) would do quite well I
think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably
freeware? Thanl you so much for any help.

I found some inconsistency in various programs, especially freeware
such that data entered in one program may not be readable in another,
so be careful. Maybe do some tests & see if it can be read with
photoshop, acdsee, exiftool, windows explorer properties, etc...

The standard for comments as I understand is not exif but IPTC which
journalists use. Although yeah exif makes more sense because that's
already got all the camera data, GPS & such.

Good luck, let us know what you find.

--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

all google groups messages filtered due to spam

OK, here's what I worked out. Two freeware programs that seem to handle
jpeg comments in the EXIF data in the same way are Faststone Image
Viewer and Irfanview. Any comment added or edited in one shows up fine
in the other. And Faststone has a nifty window for working on these
comments, with prev and next buttons so you can step through a series of
images quite guickly, adding/editing the comments as you go. I generally
use Faststone for most image organising/editing/etc. and fall back onto
Irfanview for some more exotic stuff.

So these will be the two I think I will stick with for now. It seems
quite long comments can be added - I don't know if there is a size
limit, but the main thing is that the comments travel with the file and
are readable in commonly available and currently "alive" software. These
two programs seem to fill all the requirements.

Thank you for your "comments" (pun intended) which are helpful as I
continue to learn all about digital photography after decades of good
ol' films. I really am just a beginner.

I've only tinkered with this part of it but still I'd advise caution.
Post a sample & see if people can read your comments in a variety of
programs. It appears to be common for these programs to make mistakes or
at least to be inconsistent in their format.

On approach I've found quite capable is flickr.com has really handy web
based annotation and keyword tagging. I'm not saying it's the answer but
it is pretty damn nice and there are big advantages to having the
annotation on the web to let google do the searching like getting the
ratings of the general public to help with culling.

Thinking high-end, the more advanced programs use a separate database
for this stuff and while that has it's own issues, it is at least
possible to extract the data and reformat it to a new setup. In a worst
case scenario you might resort to exiftool to pull out the info into
little text files and have that to convert to a new standard so I'd
check that one for sure. I'm willing to test a bit.

--
Paul Furman
www.edgehill.net
www.baynatives.com

all google groups messages filtered due to spam

Just take the IPTC tags. This is a standard since 15 years and will
remain for the forseeable future. Browsing through the thumbmails and
reading the comments immediately without any additional fumbling can be
done best with Thumbsplus. The tag window can be customized to your
needs. It always shows the full information with a line wrap. Othe r
programs show only the first few characters. TIFs can be also commented,
which is a major advantage. For a fast and successive tagging and
commenting, I use Xnview.

Farncis

Peter in New Zealand schrieb:
It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are often
called different things in different programs, and there's not much
standardisation between them. After working with a variety of different
programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library, Faststone, Irfanciew,
Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I have settled on the EXIF field
usually called "JPEG comment" to add, well, comments to my pics. Faststone
and Irfanview both call it the same thing and both can read and edit it,
which will do for me as I am comfortable with both programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me thumbnails
with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can quickly go through a
heap of images adding/amending the comments. Faststone and Irfanview are
both slow when doing a large number. A sort of Windows Explorer type of
interface with thumbnails down one side and a column for JPEG comments
(editable) would do quite well I think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably freeware?
Thanl you so much for any help.

I understand your comment re using IPTC rather than JPEG comments. I've been
digging around on the Internet and done some reading on this whole issue and
I understand it better now than I did a few days ago. I took a look at
Thumbsplus and I like what I see, but unfortunately finances at present do
not allow me to consider it. Maybe in the future. In the meantime Xnview
seems the best alternative that has a license I can use. I have also just
discovered that Picasa displays and edits IPTC comments only it calls them
"Captions". And of course good old Irfanview just shows everything anyway.
So there's some choice out there for me.

I appreciate the helpful comments I have received in this group - thank you
all.

--
Peter in New Zealand. (Email address is fake)
Collector of old cameras, tropical fish fancier, good coffee nutter, and
compulsive computer fiddler.


"Francis" wrote in message
...
Just take the IPTC tags. This is a standard since 15 years and will remain
for the forseeable future. Browsing through the thumbmails and reading the
comments immediately without any additional fumbling can be done best with
Thumbsplus. The tag window can be customized to your needs. It always
shows the full information with a line wrap. Othe r programs show only the
first few characters. TIFs can be also commented, which is a major
advantage. For a fast and successive tagging and commenting, I use Xnview.

Farncis

Peter in New Zealand schrieb:
It seems that jpeg comments, captions, labels, tags, and so on, are often
called different things in different programs, and there's not much
standardisation between them. After working with a variety of different
programs, including Microsoft Digital Image Library, Faststone,
Irfanciew, Picasa, XnView, and Windows Photo Gallery, I have settled on
the EXIF field usually called "JPEG comment" to add, well, comments to my
pics. Faststone and Irfanview both call it the same thing and both can
read and edit it, which will do for me as I am comfortable with both
programs.

The thing is, now I am looking for some program that can show me
thumbnails with the JPEG comments in an editable form so I can quickly go
through a heap of images adding/amending the comments. Faststone and
Irfanview are both slow when doing a large number. A sort of Windows
Explorer type of interface with thumbnails down one side and a column for
JPEG comments (editable) would do quite well I think.

After all that, can anyone help me with a suggestion, preferably
freeware? Thanl you so much for any help.