I am hoping to build a web-album site, but I am a total novice at such. In particular would like to create dynamic albums based on tags specifying names, places, dates, etc.

Could someone recommend an information source as to which tags should be used, and which values will allow such albums. In particular, how to tag photographs with more than one persons name.

I am using exiftool for tagging, but the number of tags it recognizes is beyond my ability to sort out!

Any help would be appreciated, and one or more URL pointers should be sufficient.

Thank you.

I can't help you with exiftool (I don't even know it). If that does nto work as expected you need to contact its developer.

Zenphoto will recognize all tags embeded as meta data. On how to create dynamic Zenphoto album see the user guide. It is hard to miss that article.

First, exiftool is a command-line program, with batching abilities, which sets just about all EXIF, IPTC, Comment, mp3, etc. tags on files which accept them. It is just the first tagging program I found, so I am most familiar with it.

Second, I have not tagged photos, almost all of my tagging experience has been with music files, and they have a very stereotyped tagging set. It is not clear to me how to use the Keywords field(s) in the IPTC tag group, which I have assumed would be the place to work. I understand that the Keywords field can contain a large number of max 64 byte items (I don't know if the separating "," or ";" are counted), but I don't know what is reasonable to put in these sub-fields.

For example, People's names, location, date taken, etc. Does one assume that a viewer can enter a name, e.g., and the program searches for it? Or does one present the viewer with a list that they can chose from? How does one usefully represent approximate or conjectural dates? I have may photos which are annotated as "late 1930s" or "circa 1933". I have others where I can guess, but only in a range. How specific should locations be, "New York State", "Greene County, New York", "Round Top, New York", "John Doe's house, Cairo, New York"?

I've been searching for examples and guidance, with very little luck.

Any pointers (URLs or publications) with advice and tutorials for the hopelessly confused would be appreciated.

You can tag images with whatever keywords you want to enter. What keywords you use to say what is your decision we can't tell you. Normally you divide them by comma in these exif fields.

Zenphoto will read from the Exif meta info and then add to its database entries for the image which you then can search using our built in search engine.

You can also tag images using Zenphoto but note that info entered on Zenphoto is not attached as meta data to the images themselves.

You will understand that this is not the right place for general EXIF help or telling you how to use tags at all.

Two comments, and then I'll go away.

1) I am looking at the IPTC tag group, not the EXIF. I trust that Zenphoto does access these as well.

2) If you read my previous post, I wasn't asking for help in this forum, I was asking if anyone knew of some sources that I could go to. I never expected a tutorial here, and it is clear that no such helping hand is offered in this venue. I did hope that a reference would be given, but that is obviously also not the case.

Cyril N. Albergz

1) I think so.

2) Then I did probably missunderstand your question in that regard. There are surely photographer forums that might be of more help to you with these specific infos. I at least can't help with that (I rarely take photos actually). Maybe someone else here does.

EXIF does not in fact have keywords. That is IPTC data only. And we do support, but we do not do the hierarchical, only single level.

There is a plugin which will suggest tags to the user, but it is based on him entering at least the starting letter.

Generally speaking, the tags you use should be "common" among the users you expect. So, for instance if you have landscape photography you would want to use the common terms used by landscape photographers, etc.

For general use things that "describe" the image would be used--place, subject, etc.

Just have a look at Picasa. It's free and has the abilty to add IPTC tags very fast and easy.

Regards,
Christoph

Also as a reference to what the "standards" are for IPTC (it is of course a standard) you could refer to their site. They have some very informative (and sometimes a bit overwhelming) information on the fields.

http://www.iptc.org/site/Home/

I guess I should have checked back sooner! Thank you everyone who as added to the suggestions.

The most cogent (albeit somewhat overwhelming) discussion of Keywords that I've found has been at:

http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/

A few levels down from that page is a comment:

"First off, if you are adding captions and keywords to images that are destined to be part of another collection, be sure to ask the appropriate staff member if they have any specific guidelines, style sheets, or the like."

I would think that this suggestion would apply equally to a program which one is hoping to use to organize and display said images. Hence my asking here.

As I have said, I'm a novice here. I was hoping to be able to label (tag) photos with information that could be used to generate dynamic album displays. (Pardon me if I get the lingo twisted, I hope I'm not saying the opposite of what I mean.)

In particular, I want the names of the people in the image, preferably in

lastname, firstname [middle name or names] [descriptive info, e.g. John Jone's mother, when that is all the info I have]

This raises two issues, how to mark the string as a name, and how to include the comma, if that is what is used as a separator.

I also would like place, which might be a country, a city or town, someones house, etc., etc., where any item could be specified as a member of another.

I would like to indicate family membership (which might be multi-values), and time, which could be rather vague -- as bad as "late 19th century".

I've been fighting with Picasa for a while, and though it allows you to specify the identity of people it does NOT store that information as tags in the photo, but in a proprietary database (distributed around the computer). I have figured out most of it, and am writing some programs convert the information into batch commands for exiftool, but just dropping the names, etc., into the IPTC Keywords slot isn't going to help if ZENphoto doesn't recognize the format I use.

But no one seems to describe the expected formant, and my queries haven't, as yet elicited any such description. It is like being told about a programming language and what it can do, and them being asked to write a program in it without a manual or even a syntax specification and a list of operators!

If all you wish to do with the tags is organize dynamic albums, then you should use a minimalist approach. Simply decide what albums you want to create and use something equivalent to the album name as a tag. Tag all images you want in the album with that tag and presto-you are done.

But if you want to allow viewers to find material based on keywords you have to apply more insite.

What to use for tags is really not part of the Domain of Zenphoto. Zenphoto is a general purpose image/CMS tool. I am sorry if this is all confusing to you and that there is no explicit guide for what you should be doing. Unfortunately, there cannot be such as these decisions are all very much dependent on what your material is and what your viewers will think of searching for. Specifics of tags will depend upon the specifics of the subject matter. Certainly you understand that is something that no one but you can know.

In your case that would appear the subject matter is a “family album”. The tag types you describe seem appropriate—but the bottom line is that you need to anticipate the words your viewers are likely to use when trying to find something.

In response to your specific questions:

Tags are not context sensitive. They are just keywords that are associated with an object. So there is no concept of a “name”. You can use the person’s full name as a tag; however, someone searching for the person will need to match the way you represent the name. You may wish to have several variants of the name as tags—e.g. Michael Standish, Mike Standish, M Standish.

The same would apply to places. Note that the tag_suggest plugin will aid your users in their quest as it will present possible tags based on their typing.

If your tags contain commas or other characters which Zenphoto might consider as delimiters to the search expression they will have to be encased in quotations when the search is entered.

Anything Picasa puts into an image metadata keyword will be treated as a tag by Zenphoto. But Zenphoto does not “recognize” any format. It simply uses what is presented. It is your viewers who must be able to deal with the format, so it is their intuition you must consider when choosing Keywords/Tags.

Thank you very much for your comments. Yes, I do find this rather confusing! I had hoped for some sort of structure in the tagging machinery, say tags of the form:

Country:Germany
Nameoe, John
Time:Late 1930s

The description in the exiftool documentation stated that the Keyword tag could have an indefinite number of values, each limited to 64 bytes. I interpreted this to mean that the tags were distinguished structurally, not by explicit delimiting/separating characters. I admit that I hadn't found out how one added new values to the Keywords, and I guess I should have experimented rather than jumping to conclusions.

So, do I understand then that while each value of the Keyword tag is limited to 64 bytes it is not assigned a specific 64 bytes? Does this mean that the separator character uses one of those bytes? Or does the separator (comma in the case of ZENphoto) exist only at the GUI level, and not within the IPTC data in the image?

If the above is unclear, I guess it reflects my lack of grasp of the problem. I have been avoiding XML tags, but I'm beginning to think that that would be the way to go. I assume (correctly?) that ZENphoto can use those rather than IPTC Keywords.

Perplexed,

Cyril Alberga

Keyword tags are just strings of characters. If placed in IPTC metadata they are limited to 64 characters. Characters is characters. All count.

Separators are not part of Keywords, they are part of search expressions. So if you are talking about a search of `John`, `Goeorge`. The keywords are `John` and `George`. But if you are describing a keyword of `Mathes, John R.` then all these characters are part of the keyword.

XML tags are quite different from IPTC Keywords. You can have an XML tag that secifies a keyword list but that just is a different means of storing the keywords, so I doubt that changin to XML will help you. But should you choose to do so, you will need to enable and properly configure the XML tag handling plugin.

It really does sound like you need to go do some basic research on this topic. This forum is really not the place for these basics.

Again thank you, and it seems that I should close this thread at this point. I'm going to have to play with exiftool and/or "Face Embedder" which seems to add both keywords and XML, including the specification of the rectangle marking the persons face (as recorded by Picasa). I will have to see if I can used this to create <MAP> statements in the HTML. Time to brush-up on JavaScript I guess.

So, I thank you for your time and effort to bring we into this world of "albums". I really don't want to roll my own!