Tagging software

Posted under General

スラッシュ

Punakea is Mac only so that's not a very useful suggestion to anybody.

...

With a PC, that is!

Vista actually supports tagging natively already, although I don't make use of it. I hear it's pretty limited.

TaggedFrog ( http://lunarfrog.com/taggedfrog/ ) looks pretty good.

Personally I'm holding out on these half-assed solutions until a truly folder-free format is developed. Microsoft, Apple, Linux guys, are you listening? :(

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gaastra

スラッシュ said:Personally I'm holding out on these half-assed solutions until a truly folder-free format is developed.

So meanwhile what do you do?
make a check sum of the file & store tags in a txt file so you can auto export all your tags if needed?

I was thinking that it wont be that bad idea, to tag my images. But i dont know yet how should I store the tags. & how should I shecksum them. Is the MD5 is a good idea? isnt AES better?

Well im thinking how should i store the tags in this case?
I could make 1 big txt file with tons of checksums & tags, but if i need to export my tags it would be pretty time consuming to loop through the txt file & search for a match each time.

do you have any suggestions maybe?

will the database perform faster?

EDIT: yes this tagged frog has potential, but it still suck as hell. is unusable app atm.

Updated by gaastra

Reply
Azalyn

The Photo Gallery in Vista isn't too bad for tagging, its not very flexible in terms of being able to control the display output; but is decent for a small # of images.

If you're trying to organize a large # of pics, using a real database is the most efficient way to go. There's a good number of wiki's out there that are specialized for image organization; which is what I ultimately ended up doing. Trying to maintain a folder structure became unreasonable, and wasn't practical to search through.

Biggest limitations with using a wiki is the resources you have available to you. Since you'll be the only one using it you won't need much power in terms of hardware (save disk space and IO speed) since MySQL, Apache and php don't take up much system resources (for a single user). Setting the framework up is only part of the job though, tagging all your own images can be tedious work (as this is an instance where you really get out of it what you put into it).

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スラッシュ

gaastra said:
So meanwhile what do you do?
make a check sum of the file & store tags in a txt file so you can auto export all your tags if needed?

That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. I have saved text files with meta-esque info before.

I don't have a large image library, so that's not an issue for me. But for my large music library I use foobar2000 which has a built-in library system (which by the way I find repulsive on principle--a player shoudln't also be a library, but sadly foobar is by far the best solution for music around for any platform). My even larger sample library (as a professional game sound designer I need to have a lot of samples at the ready at all times) is handled by yet another specialized database-type program called Basehead.

Overall I want to avoid using something hacky like TaggedFrog or any other tag program within Windows/Linux (not an OSX user) that will become obsolete when a real tag-based non-linear file system is made preferably from the ground up. I honestly think it's sad that we're still stuck in this metaphor of physical cabinets/folders for our virtual storage system. It's so absurdly narrow-minded, and a constant annoyance to me, but I just have to live with it for now.

EDIT: Bit of a rant, and no real answer, sorry.

Reply
gaastra

huhh.. yea past 4 hours i have been trying to set up my database, so I can try out tagging. But this SQL setting up is soo complicated. Maybe you can help me out a little?

So far I set up Portable Abyss Web Server & php & its all working nice. same goes for SQL I want to have it all portable, so if I need to acess my database I can do it with 1 double click.

So I DL the mysql-noinstall-5.1.35-win32.zip

Extracted it in C:\Abyss Web Server\mysql_5.1.35

& now im stuck & do not know what to do next.

I know how to start it via winmysqladmin.exe

But How Can I set my username & password & how can I connect to my server using navicat or:

mysql-gui-tools-noinstall\MYSQLAdministrator.exe

I tried & all i get is cant connect.

I know its localhost, but whats my username & pass?

Yes did search google, but the ppl who wrote the guides think i can read their minds & know how, & where to input those commands to do stuff...

Reply
gaastra

yosome said:
Alternatively, just use XAMPP, it includes phpMyAdmin:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Abyss is pretty same as Xamp & Wamp cuz Abyss is also running Apache in portable mode.

So I start winmysqladmin.exe & it asks me for user & pass.
I enter testuser 123 & hit ok

I open phpmyadmin & try to enter testuser 123 & get this error.
SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci';
#1193 - Unknown system variable 'NAMES'

I try navicat with user root & blank pass & get also error:
Error Acess deinied for user@localhost using pass yes

same error if I dont use pass with root user.
Error Acess deinied for user@localhost using pass No

See it does not work.

Reply
Azalyn

gaastra said:
I try navicat with user root & blank pass & get also error:
Error Acess deinied for user@localhost using pass yes

same error if I dont use pass with root user.
Error Acess deinied for user@localhost using pass No

See it does not work.

I constantly ran into problems with mysql on that part of the setup. If you don't setup the password correctly on the install (am assuming you're using the config wizard) it makes subsequent tries fruitless. Ultimately had to uninstall and nuke all registry entry's in order to get a truly clean (re)install and set the root password for the database to get it to finally work. Once you can get the service/daemon running its easy enough to fix anything else via the query command line.

Granola said:
I use the little danbooru downloader program to separate stuff into folders. This way I know a folder will for certain have a certain tag.

Problem with that is while some images will have a prevalent ID, every image has multiple attributes in which to tag them with. You could batch import the folders, but will still need to go through each one and add extra tags that apply.

Nice thing is there is (free) software available to create everything you'll need for a real image archive that's searchable. Main drawback is they're not exactly user friendly in terms of setup, you generally need to know what you're doing since the installation instructions for some programs out there are minimal at best, telling you what needs to be done but no instructions on how to do it.

Reply
LaC

piespy said:
For general files of all types, Punakea is excellent.

Wow, I hadn't heard about it. It sounds exactly like what I wanted to make when Tiger came out, but never had time for. Why does this keep happening? :(

Reply
gaastra

okkey it took a day, but my portable database is running.

all i need to is figure out how to store the data.

I was thinking this:

separate table for tags+Unique ID & separate for checksumsID connected to thetag ID. But im not sure yet.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Question regarding punakea

To use punkea, what Os do I need? Mac OS x or mac os x leopard or leopard 10 how is it called? I will try to install it on my virtual PC & try it out, but does punakea have import tags & export tags option?

If yes what is the format the data is stored when exporting? txt file that windows can read?

Updated by gaastra

Reply
piespy

I don't think Punakea has an export or import option. Since it stores the tags in each file's metadata, which is indexed by Finder, the question is whether Finder's search index has such options... and I think the answer is no. It's relatively easy to script it though using AppleScript.

I haven't used it much lately because I got too lazy to tag... basically I'd need something that prompts for tags as soon as I save a file. Otherwise it just piles up and I never get around to tagging them...

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