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Tagging photographs

rated 0 times [ 2] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 5460 / 2 Years ago, mon, october 31, 2022, 5:23:09

I am trying to organize my photographs with tags. The last time I have been doing this was about three years ago, so I have a lot of pictures to organize.

All of the photographs should have correct EXIF tags for the time they were shot. I want to manually add tags for the people appearing in the photos.

My requirements are simple. Labels should be stored inside the photos themselves, in the form of IPTC or XMP tags, and it should be easy to do mass tagging, say by selecting a bunch of photos and adding a common tag. Since this task is mostly visual, I'd rather not use command line tools. If possible, I would like to have the timing of the shot copied from EXIF to ITPC or XMP, in order to have all tags in the same format.

I have been trying to use Shotwell for this, but it is rather annoying. Shotwell wants me to import all the photos before being able to tag them, and this makes it difficult to go folder by folder and tag the pictures. It would be easier for me to tag the pictures beforehand and only then copy them into my main photo folder, which is where Shotwell looks for new pictures.

Are there any good tools to tag photos? I would need something like an EasyTag equivalent.

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hentor

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago wheance · Accepted Answer

I recently did this with a large photo collection, and I recommend you stay with Shotwell for this. You have to use a few tricks to get what you want though.

First, make sure you set 'Write tags, titles and other metadata to photo files' in Shotwell, like in @Paradiesstaub's comment.

If the folder names are to be used for tagging, say like 'New Year's Eve', then import folders individually and tag that batch, they'll be listed as 'Last Import' at the top left of the Shotwell window.

Once you get all your folders imported, tag everyone. Once you have everything tagged, it's already written to the individual files. You can move them around and the tags stay.

At this point, you can leave the files in the original folders, or have Shotwell organise them. I chose to have Shotwell organise them by Year and Month sub-folders. To do this, I selected all the files, and exported them from Shotwell to a backup drive. Then, I deleted everything from Shotwell, and re-imported from the backup drive. Now I just import and tag new ones as I go, and Shotwell watches the directory and keeps it organised.