The Problem
Have you ever browsed through your parent's photo album and wished they had written captions for those handful of 20 year old photos?
Fast forward to today where we take thousands of digital photos.
How do you add captions or ever find them again?
Fast forward to today where we take thousands of digital photos.
How do you add captions or ever find them again?
The Solution
iTag is a free tool that adds title, description and keyword tags to your photos and movies.
The captions you enter are embedded into each file using industry standard IPTC and XMP headers - all in a lossless operation that doesn't degrade the image.
Many other applications read and write to these headers too, so once the captions have been entered using iTag they are automatically discovered and reused by online photo sharing services like Flickr, search tools such as Picasa and Copernic and many more.
iTag works with your local files to do the following:
- Tag photo and movie files (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, RAW and AVI) with Title, Description, Rating and Keywords
- Adjust timestamps of photos (screenshot)
- Geocode your photos and movies by embedding GPS coordinates using Google Earth (screenshot)
- Search for tagged files with iTag's powerful search engine using keyword, rating, filename or even a street address if you have geocoded photos (screenshot)
- Search for files that are missing tags
- Generate Cooliris slideshows for your local photos and movies (formerly known as PicLens)
- ...and much more!
There are other applications that can tag photos but often their focus is on one... slow... photo at a time - making batch tagging a laborious process. iTag works best when given sets of related photos - so it very easy to add the tag wedding to the 40 photos you took at your friends wedding.
iTag
was given 5 stars by freewaregenius,
has been featured on lifehacker
and enthusiastic volunteers have translated it into
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish,
Dutch,
French,
German,
Hungarian,
Japanese,
Portuguese &
Slovenian.
News
-
27 September 2008
Build 334 adds shortcuts for jumping between the edit boxes and it is now possible to copy and paste metadata between files -
20 September 2008
Build 332 adds several improvements including:
- Chinese (Traditional) translations thanks to Ivan Chau
- PNG, TIFF and THM file types now have full tag support
The change log is available here. -
4 September 2008
Build 328 is a minor release to fix some bugs in the Cooliris export. Details here. -
16 August 2008
Build 316 has been some time in the making and has more new features than you can poke a stick at!
- RAW files for Nikon, Canon and Sony cameras are fully supported
- AVI movie files can be indexed and tagged (designed for movies from your camera, not your DVDs of Titanic!)
- Sound memo files attached to your photos are detected and played back
- View local movies and photos in a Cooliris slideshow (Firefox only)
- Danish translations added (thanks to Per Gammerath)
- Portuguese translations added (thanks to Rodolfo Cezar Ranulfo Vaz!)
iTag's prerequisite - the Microsoft .NET Framework - is now installed automatically when you install iTag.
16 July 2008
Build 266 fixes a render bug in Windows XP Classic and Royale themes where textboxes had no border.This is a minor release while work is completed on some major new features....coming soon!
27 May 2008
Build 265 has several new features:* Photos can be sent to the recycle bin using the Delete key
* Tag cloud font sizes can be adjusted via context menu
* A new icon to indicate when a photo has no metadata added yet
* The progress of generating high quality thumbnails is now visible in the status bar
For more details see the change log
9 May 2008
My webhost managed to hose my MX records when they decided to move servers around, so if you sent an email between May 5 and May 9 - please resend as it has disappeared into the ether.25 April 2008
Build 245 has some bugfixes and adds some existing functions to the toolbar2 April 2008
Build 240 adds Hungarian language support - thanks Laszlo!26 March 2008
Build 235 has some minor tweaks including:* New search features to find untagged photos
* Photos can be dragged out of iTag into Windows Explorer (performs copy - not move)
* KMZ output improved for better compatibility with Google Maps
1 March 2008
Build 230 has a restructured search database to improve performance for very large photo collections.Slovenian support has also been added (thanks Primoz!) along with some other small enhancements.
8 February 2008
Build 220 adds address based search for geocoded photos and a query builder for building more complex queries.
Enter any address that Google Maps will accept and iTag will find geocoded photos that are nearby.
21 January 2008
Build 215 adds the ability to give your photos ratings.
Afterward, search for photos by rating by using the new rating: operator.
For example: Searching for car rating:5 will find any car photos with a rating of 5.
If you just want to see your all of your best photos, searching for rating:4,5 which will bring back any photos with a score of 4 or 5.
If that brings back too many photos then change the maximum limits with the limit: operator.
Searching for rating:4,5 limit:100 will show the first 100 photos with a rating of 4 or 5.
Note: Non English translations have their own translated search operators. Move the mouse over the search box for a hint as to the correct operator and number separator.
15 January 2008
Build 210 has some bug fixes as well as new features and improvements:* Tag Manager - Use the Tag Manager to fill the Tag Bucket with historical tags to ensure consistency (known as a controlled vocabulary)
* Author/Copyright - New fields that can be read and written
* Adjust Date Taken - Photo times can be set to a specific value or shifted by a relative amount
* Ignores Hidden Folders - Indexing no longer picksup the Picasa hidden 'originals' folders
05 December 2007
While externally little different to its predecessor Build 200 has undergone a major rewrite underneath the hood.The rewrite provides a very solid foundation from which to extend and make further functional enhancements.
(For the technically minded - almost the entire application has been converted from WinForms to WPF)
None the less there are several small enhancements in this release
* Thumbnail size is controlled by a slider
* Small thumbnails are visible in grid view mode (Drag the thumbnail slider all the way to the left)
* JPEG comment fields are now automatically read into photo description
* The zoom function is now keyboard accessible (move the mouse over a photo and hit Alt-Z)
13 October 2007
Build 190 simplifies geocoding and improves the options for loading photos into Google Earth.1 October 2007
Build 188 honours the EXIF orientation flag to automatically rotate portrait photos (when supported by camera)26 September 2007
Build 186 adds XMP encoding - additional to IPTC.XMP brings much improved support for non English languages.
Dutch (anonymous) and Japanese (thanks Nardog!) support has also been added in this build.
22 August 2007
Build 182 fixes several cases where certain conditions can lead to a crash18 August 2007
Minor fix in build 181 reduces memory consumption during the indexing process (solving a crash out when indexing more than 100,000 photos).9 August 2007
Build 180 released.
The major change is that searching for your photos based on the IPTC data is now supported
Search works over title, description and tags.
7 June 2007
Build 166 released.Spell checking added to title and tag inputs, some bug fixes and some minor new features
14 Apr 2007
Build 165 released.Oops, Builds 160 and 162 were rather unstable after my fixes to make the thumbnails load faster.
This version should eliminate the crashing problems. There are some other small fixes too.
Also, spellcheck has been added to the photo description textbox.
18 Mar 2007
Build 162 released.Fixed the null reference exception that sometimes occurred when sending a photo to Google Earth.
Updated Exiv2 to 0.13
3 Mar 2007
Build 160 released.iTag now requires .NET Framework 3.0
The major change in this release is that thumbnails now load super fast. Hoorah!
