While I intended to spend most of this morning sending out resumes and looking through job sites, instead I burned through about 4 hours at the La Jolla Public Library looking through articles on Photo Album programs. After about the first hour I narrowed my choices down to Adobe Photo Album, Picasa, and Exifer.

They each have their advantages and disadvantages, but the true problem clearly lies in how photos are stored.

When you use Windows Media Player or iTunes or any other program to play your song files, you can organize them by author, song title, album, genre and lots of other fields most people don’t know about including “mood.” All of that information is stored in the song file itself at the end of the actual music in something called an ID3 tag. Now it’s important that the information is stored within each file because otherwise when you copy the file to another computer or open it with another program, you’d have to re-enter all the information again.

The same goes with photographs. Instead of ID3, the stored information is called EXIF data. It also stores an impressive amount of useful fields like date, aperture, shutter speed, and camera type. The newer specification can even store GPS information to record where exactly the photo was taken. (that was a result of discussion on the excellent Geowanking listserve) But as far as describing what the photo is actually about (ie. who’s in it, what memories it brings up, how it’s related to other photos) there is only one field called “comment.”

So some photo album software uses that comment field as a place to put captions about the photo. Short descriptions up to 1999 bytes of information. That’s not a bad way to digitally scribble notes on the back of a photo, but it’s not very efficient in organizing massive collections of photos.

That’s where programs like Picasa and Adobe Photo Album try to do better. Picasa (like Apple’s iPhoto) uses keywords as a way to organize photos. You can associate various key words with each photo to describe and organize it. I’ve attached the following keywords to this photo: “influx” “cafe” “san” “diego.” There’s no reason for me to add the date because it’s already included in the EXIF data, but I did include the city, because it doesn’t have the GPS info with it. Adobe Photo Album’s method is pretty similar – it uses something called tags – basically key words – based on people, places, and events. So let’s say I have about 50 photos of Haloween over the past 10 years. I could create a tag called “haloween” under the events category and then drag that tag to each of those 50 photos. Then when I click on the tag, those photos come up and I have a gallery of all my Haloweens over the years. Or I could create a tag called “Laura” and I’d have a gallery of every photo of my girlfriend. The advantage of tags over keywords is that tags are hierarchical so if I make a tag under the sub-category “family” which is under the category “person,” then applying that one tag will give me more information than just using the keyword of the person’s name.

Now obviously I’m not the only one interested in archiving my photographs. Photojournalists have needed to categorize their collections of digital photos for years now which is how the IPTC got started. They came up with a set of specifications like EXIF to describe photographs taken for news stories. But because the IPTC is a council of news agencies, the specifications focused on the needs of the photojournalist and not the person organizing a private photo album.

Enter Adobe and XMP. Finally … finally, just two weeks ago the IPTC and Adobe announced that they have agreed upon a standard to describe photos much like ID3 tags describe audio files.

So what does all this mean? That finally we’re reaching a standard for metadata describing files. And that despite Picasa’s beautiful design and quick, intelligent processing, I’m going to stick to Adobe Photo Album to organize my photos on the assumption that the next version will integrate my taxonomy into XMP data with each file.