Image organizer

Common image organizers features

• Multiple thumbnail previews are viewable on a single screen and printable on a single page.
• Images can be organized into albums
• Albums can be organized into collections
• User roles and permissions enable controlled access to certain images while preventing access to others.
• Adding tags. Tags can be stored externally, or in industry-standard IPTC or XMP headers inside each image file or in sidecar files.
• Share: Resizing, exporting, e-mailing and printing.

  Not so common, or differentiating features

• Pictures can be organized by one or more mechanisms
• * Images can be organized into folders, which may correspond to file-system folders.
• * Images may be organized into albums, which may be distinct from folders or file-system folders.
• * Albums may be organized into collections, which may not be the same as a folder hierarchy.
• * Grouping or sorting by date, location, and special photographic metadata such as exposure or f-stops if that information is available. See Exif for example.
• * Images can appear in more than one album
• * Albums can appear in more than one collection
• * Grouped or stacking of images within an album, by date, time, and linking copies to originals.
• * Adding and editing titles and captions
• Simple or sophisticated search engines to find photos
• * Searching by keywords, caption text, metadata, dates, location or title
• * Searching with logical operators and fields, such as " and not "
• Separate backing up and exporting of metadata associated with photos.
• Retouching of images
• Editing images in third-party graphical software and then re-incorporating them into the album automatically
• Stitching to knit together panoramic or tiled photos
• Grouping of images to form a slideshow view
• Exporting of slideshows as HTML or flash presentations for web deployment
• Synchronizing of albums with web-based counterparts, either third-party, or application specific.
• Retention of Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata already embedded in the image file itself

  Two categories of image organizers

• Automatic image organizers. These are software packages that read data present in digital pictures and use this data to automatically create an organization structure. Each digital picture contains information about the date when the picture was taken. It is this piece of information that serves as the basis for automatic picture organization. The user usually has little or no control over the automatically created organization structure. Some tools create this structure on the hard drive, while other tools create a virtual structure.
• Manual image organizers. This kind of software provides a direct view of the folders present on a user's hard disk. Sometimes referred to as image viewers, they allow the user only to see the pictures but do not provide any automatic organization features. They give maximum flexibility to a user and show exactly what the user has created on their hard drive. While they provide maximum flexibility, manual organizers rely on the user to have their own method to organize their pictures. Currently there are two main methods for organizing pictures manually: tag and folder based methods. While not mutually exclusive, these methods are different in purposes, procedures, and outcomes.

Future of image organization

• colour, shape and texture recognition
• subject recognition
• fully or semi-automated facial, torso or body recognition
• geo-temporal sorting and event clustering. Many software will sort by time or place; experimental software has been used to predict special events such as birthdays based on geo-temporal clustering.

• automatically assign keywords based on content, or
• measure the distance between an untagged image and some template image which is associated with a keyword, and then propose that the operator apply the same keyword to the untagged images

  Notable image organizers