Wanted: Image Tagging Software

While searching for pictures to be used for the next Japanese lesson chapter, I realized that I really need a new way of organizing my image folders. Sorting pictures by the series they come from is good and all, but it’s a pain when I want to look for, say, a picture of a character riding a bicycle. The worst thing is that since most of my pictures came from image BBS, their filenames are all strings of numbers which aren’t exactly very informative.

What’s more, whenever a nice picture of unknown origin comes along, I would just dump it into the “Unclassified” folder, or as I call it “The Black Hole”. When I eventually find out about a certain series months later, I am too lazy to search through the Black Hole to locate and reclassify everything from that series. So eventually most of the images on my hard drive end up in one huge browsing-unfriendly folder, forcing me to spend a lot of time looking for pictures when I blog… And that’s one of the reasons why the next Beginner’s Japanese chapter is overdue. No, really…

I need an image sorting software. After some half-hearted googling and trying out some freewares, I have yet to find a program that fits my requirements. What I need is a program that can:

  • Display images from multiple folders in a single list
  • Allow me to tag keywords to each picture
  • Batch tagging and renaming
  • Search and sort using associated keywords
  • Rename a file according to its tags (not important)

It doesn’t have to be freeware (*cough*). To put it simply, I need an offline version of danbooru.

Any suggestions?

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20 Responses to Wanted: Image Tagging Software

  1. Mayu says:

    I believe iPhoto for Mac does just that. As for Windows, good luck finding anything even mildly organised.

  2. mechjman says:

    Irfanview is there in terms of thumbnailing a plethora of images, and you can do some nifty things with it. Its free at http://www.irfanview.com

  3. tj han says:

    Heh my office is using image archiving software but it costs a thousand. What would be cool is something like Danbooru itself.

  4. omo says:

    Well, if you’re brave enough you can always just install danbooru locally.

  5. Albert says:

    I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an app that does something like this. I’d like to hear more ideas.

  6. Kurogane says:

    I was already asking for a offline version of danbooru a few months back. I agree its a bitch sorting through all my 4chan, nchan, downloads and danbooru pics. 1000+ images are not fun to play around with.

    I *was* trying with the idea to install the danbooru code on my PC and run as local server, but it’s too complicated for me to figure out :p.

  7. DarkMirage says:

    Well, I just tried Picasa from Google and I’m in the process of illegally downloading obtaining a copy of Adobe Photoshop Album right now.

    Picasa has a nice interface and it mostly does what I wanted. Best of all, it’s free. Image “labels” work fine for what I require, but the way Picasa displays labels like individual folders (instead of just metadata used for searching) is somewhat annoying, because the main window displays the content of ALL your labels and folders, so if you have multiple labels on the same picture, the main display is going to be goddamn loooong. That said, I will probably use this unless Photoshop Album does better. We’ll see.

    I don’t like to leave apache running on my main computer so danbooru is out. Adding all my images to the database would also probably be a nightmare.

    That said, it would be good if someone made an offline application that does the same as danbooru and has a decent user interface. Maybe even an extendable image tagging standard like APEv2 so that we can define attributes like “series” and “artist”. *nudge Albert*

  8. DarkMirage says:

    zomg yes. that’s just what I want. The tagging function is just like I imagined it. :O That said, it has nothing else. Zero folder and image management. Can’t even do a search with the tags……

  9. meh says:

    This is an old entry, but oh well
    You might be interested in what I created for my website.
    Its kinda like danbooru, but it will automatically tag images that have xmp data in them, so loading the images would be a breeze if you already had the metadata entered.

  10. iTagger says:

    You might like to see the latest version of iTag – it can do searches now.

    http://www.itagsoftware.com

  11. voor says:

    You might also want to take a look at Photomesa. It doesn’t look like it’s being developed anymore, but it’s the closest thing I’ve found that will let me add my own tags to pictures and then do tag searches based on AND logic. Unfortunately, on my fairly old system, it slows to a crawl when I try to index a directory containing over a few hundred pics.

    http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/photomesa.shtml

  12. Player says:

    I am looking for a software to manage and tag my ACG pictures too,did you find any now?iTag is too slow,If you find a perfect one,please tell me

  13. George says:

    Was searching how good is danbooru and automation possibility

    Currently I use ACDSEE pro 2 to manage image on my local server
    It has tagging & category, DB management and tonnes of functions.
    But since it’s not codable, automation depends on it’s built in function.

  14. AtomicBill says:

    Check out http://www.tagcow.com; they had a free service to do this but look like they may be going to a paid version

  15. furka says:

    if you’re running vista, it’s just built-in; Windows Photo Gallery, it lets you easily tag images (or tag multiple images at once) displays thumbnails, previeuws, lets you rate images.

  16. T. Cook says:

    Ideally, a tagging program would be limited in scope, straightforward, and the information associated with an image would be completely portable.

    The IPTC field allows cross-software, cross-system access of tag information, because the data is stored inside the image. This is ideal.

    ACDSee has a hierarchal tag system, but only within its own database, and images tagged in that way cannot be moved from their location outside of ACDSee without losing that information. Picasa and other programs simply display a barf-list of every tag, which becomes very cumbersome, very quickly. The IPTC tags are not inherently structured, but a defined syntax COULD BE arranged that could be read and displayed in the tagging program as a manageable tree.

    A unified tagging system would be ideal as a base from which to grow, and add one’s own custom tags, rather than having a scattershot ‘to each his own tagging method’, which is suboptimal for sharing images with others via imageboards, as what is effectively the same tag will show up in the same image five times, entered by five different people. This standardised tagging scheme is probably the MOST IMPORTANT aspect for allowing optimal finding and sharing of images.

    As a novelty more than a necessity, it would be preferred for the image tagger to read the file’s datestamp, write the tag, then restore the datestamp to what it originally was.

  17. kamil says:

    Cool, good to know. I’m going to try out that Danbooru Downloader add-on because I’ve been interested in doing something like this with music files too.

    If a stand-alone browser does end up being in the works, I agree about allowing it to pull data locally, not only for the performance increase but also simply so you can get your existing collection up to speed. It would be feasible for it to access any or all of the main databases (Sankaku, Danbooru, etc., just switch them on or off when scanning) to see which files you’ve downloaded come from where.

    Another feature that would suit this project really well would be including the tag types information in the browser. This is something normal image browsers like Picasa can’t do, but it’s really useful in this kind of image collection. You want to know what’s an artist tag, and what’s a copyright tag for example. laser

  18. Mashuga31 says:

    I’ve been seriously looking for imagetagging software.

    Vista’s tagging doesn’t work for me.

    If I tag an image from PSWG with “Panty & Stocking” and “Stocking Anarchy” and then do a search for “Panty Anarchy” then it will pull the words from both tags, and the image will pop up even if it doesn’t have the tag “Panty Anarchy.”

    I hate it. So much. Tagging becomes pointless, especially if you’re dealing with a series that has the same name as a character. Take “Sonic the Hedgehog” for example.

    If I had tagging software that worked like tumblr’s multisearch I’d be golden.

  19. GrrDraxin says:

    I too have been looking for something like this.

    While Danbooru Downloader is good for initially downloading images of booru-like boards and placing them where you want (most of the time), it’s not very good at shifting a file already existing locally if it’s downloaded again under different tags. I.E. the image was new and untagged or tagged wrong, but the second time it’s downloaded it was tagged properly. But now you have 2 copies of the same file locally, one in the ‘misc’ or other folder, and one where it’s supposed to be. The firefox Danbooru Downloader add-on kind of does do this, but the standalone program to grab the images does not.

    It’s already possible to download the tag list databases from many of those services, but you need a script or program of sorts to parse them into something useable. If I could, I would reorganize my archives to have less directories for the whole thing, and reasonably short file names. Because it seems too many directories slows down accessing any files and searches. Also consolidating directories that have the same names, but with other names appended to them, to be consolidated into the largest one to keep the number of sub-directories down would be nice.

    Also, having a image duplicate search engine would help things, but I’m sure it would take a heck of a lot of resources to go through one’s entire image collection to find said images. But not impossible to do, after all, there is an online resource that does it. Why not be able to do it on your own machine?

    Basically, I want something that will parse my download logs from Danbooru Downloader, the aforementioned tag database lists, file search and matching, file moving/renaming/appending/prepending, and auto-sorting whole directory structures based on easy to understand and modifiable criteria. So being able to try out different directory/file structures without having to re-download the whole thing all over again, and costing the board(s) downloaded from valuable bandwidth, it’s more worthwhile to do such experiments on your own hardware.

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