Service can tag photos to find them quickly

Now that you’ve owned a digital camera for a while, chances are your collection of digital photographs is growing to the point where they’re becoming completely unmanageable.

If you find yourself drowning in a sea of digital images and you just can’t remember where you stored that picture of cousin Betty at the beach that you took on your vacation two years ago, you might want to consider the benefits of tagging.

Basically, a tag is nothing more than a keyword that somehow describes the image to which it is attached. And the premise behind tagging is a simple one.

The more tags you assign to an image, the better the chances are of finding it.

It turns out that there are a number of standards out there that attempt to regulate many of the different characteristics associated to digital images.

Some of the standards apply to compression. For example, the JPEG standard allows for the reduction of digital information that represents the image we see.

By eliminating a certain amount of redundancy that’s inherent in a raw digital image, the physical size of that file will be substantially smaller.

Other standards such as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) and XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) allow the inclusion of a certain amount of text to be invisibly imbedded within the digital images.

Adobe’s Photoshop Album and Apple’s iPhoto are two examples of programs that have the ability to read and act upon these invisible text tags or metadata so that you can more easily search through and locate the images that meet your search criteria.

But adding these tags can be somewhat cumbersome and hit-and-miss at best when you’re trying to add them to hundreds if not thousands of photos.

Say you have a picture of your sister’s family. You probably would add her name and the name of everyone in the picture. You may even add the date, location and the event.

But there’s a whole lot more going on in that picture that you wouldn’t even consider adding as a tag but you might use when you’re trying to find that picture a year or two later on.

Where did I put that picture we took at the beach in Hawaii with my sister wearing a pink bathing suit and her son eating a hot dog? If you didn’t add the tags hotdog, beach, pink and bathing suit, you’re not going to find it using those keywords.

But there is a service that will add all those relevant search tags to all of your photos for you.

Tagcow lets you send one photo or thousands of them to be tagged automatically.

Tagcow uses people who are expert at examining subject matter in pictures. They also use a sophisticated artificial intelligence inference engine that looks at the images and then adds tags of its own.

Together, they can process literally thousands of photographic images typically in 24 to 48 hours after submission.

Tagcow is understandably secretive in how their process works exactly.

Once your images are tagged, they are uploaded back to your computer to be used in any of your photo applications as well as online services such as Flickr or SmugMug, both of which have the ability to read the imbedded meta-data.

If you already have your images entered into Flickr, just enter your Flickr account information and Tagcow will connect to Flickr, pull down the photos, submit them for tagging and post the tags to your images in Flickr.

Tagcow offers a variety of tagging plans that begin at $9.95 for tagging 250 images. Check out the Web site for more pricing plans. Privacy is also an important issue so be sure to read Tagcow’s privacy policy before you commit to downloading your pictures to them.

With all of your photos properly tagged, you’ll be amazed at how easy it will be to search and locate virtually any single or collection of images.

Visit www.tagcow.com.

XCraig Crossman is a national newspaper columnist writing about computers and technology. For more information, visit his Web site at www.computeramerica.com.

2008 McClatchy Tribune