Send up the "tom!" bat signal. I'd be interested in the answer as well.
Here is one user's musings on the subject. It would seem that some albums can read/write tags in the EXIF metadata, but support is spotty at best.
You're looking for Tom? Click click click.
Yeah, that stuff needs to be in the portable meta info.
A friend suggested using Exifer. It looks like it might do, but I haven't even downloaded it. Also, it is a bit old.
Roll your own photo-indexer! (And then share it, with the rest of us.)
We're talking about iPhoto here or something else?
Pardon my kludgey soul, but can't you just include "tags" in long file names?
long file names
that would be teh kludgey
Doesn't Tom dislike tags? All geeks look the same to you people? Racists.
The near-equivalent of ID3 tags, platform independent, that you can add and attach to existing jpgs?
Let me know if you find something.
I do this stuff in my day job, but we don't tag the images themselves. We use a database in an open format.
There are, iirc, exif tools around that will do some of this stuff. I'll find out [somewhere I have some information on this].
The new iPhoto lets you... oh. PC.
Ne'er mind!
The tag formats to google are IPTC and XMP (and EXIF, but EXIF is really for data the camera stores in the photo, not for tagging). Both serve the same purpose as ID3 and are platform independent.
As far as software that supports them well...
There is Lightroom if you want to spend serious money (it's $300 and designed for professional photographers). It does everything you want and much much much more. There's ACDSee, which has gotten better but still stores most metadata in its own database - it supports IPTC, but you have to go through a separate step to save your ACDSee metadata as IPTC metadata. There is Photoshop Elements, which I haven't used but does appear to (mostly) store metadata in the image files. Picasa stores metadata in files, but its tagging features are limited - it is free though.
There are also a bunch of free IPTC-aware tagging tools out there. XMP is even better, but it is pretty new, and not a lot supports it.
(Yes I know 'lurker' is a not a proper name, I'll come up with something better if I every post again :)
It looks like Picasa, which I already use for red-eye fixing and stuff, supports IPTC.
This seems like a good place for it...
ttaM, how do you like your new camera. Is it too heavy? Do you have to do a bunch of post-processing (a complaint I've seen about the Sonys)? Would you do it again? I see that your flickr shots don't have EXIF; that's your choice right?
(And thanks for educating me about IPTC in 15, lurker.)
OK, so I can use Picasa to tag my photos if I have to. Now - what about uploading? Is there a way to have my IPTC tags upload to Flickr?
Roll! Your! Own!
If flickr is really clever, it'll check for those tags itself.
Actually, Flickr might check now. I'll have to run some tests tonight.
How about a pony? Would you settle for that?
I considered making a joke about how I wanted this so I could upload all of my pictures of ponies.
Your joke was not submitted before the deadline. No partial credit.