Photo database - Recommendations
 

I've got a fair number of scanned photos and an increasing number of digital ones. I'm looking for a fairly cheap (or even free!) method of cataloguing them.

Many of these photos are of various relatives. What I want is a keyword-based database so that when I type in "Great Aunt Felicity", say, it produces thumbnails of all photos with Great Aunt Felicity in them and also compiles a folder containing links to all the relevant photos.

An ability to handle simple Boolean logic would be useful as well so that I can see, say, all photos containing Great Aunt Felicity, but without cousin Bert.

Just come across this recently

Picasa

Not quite everthing you want, but pretty neat all the same

Thanks. I've downloaded it. I'll take a look.

Looks quite interesting, but there seems to be one problem. If you search on a keyword, say, Arthur, it not only brings up all pictures with the keyword Arthur, but also all files with Arthur in the title, eg Arthur's House. This is obviously a problem if you're only looking for photos of Arthur.

I've emailed their helpline, but despite the claim of a response within 24 hours, I've still had no reply.

Post a feature request on here

http://forums.picasa.net/

I would also like it to manage collections strored on CD etc - rather than copy everything to the HDD - someone already requested that.

Always difficult to find the tool that works just the way you want it too

But at the end of the day, if you have named a photo

Arthurs House

then that has something to do with Arthur, as the search suggests,

If you search for "Microsoft" on Google, do you expect it to only find Micorsofts website? or Office and Windows etc????

???

It's actually a little bit worse than that. As far I can see, if you have a folder named "Arthur & June's Wedding" and you search on the keyword Arthur, you get all the photos in the folder, including those of the wedding cake!

I'm sure there must be a solution.

But in this this case, the software bills it as a 'keyword' search, so I think Theodoric has a valid point

From the help file
"Keywords enable you to associate words with your pictures, so you can quickly locate the pictures using the Picasa keyword Search feature."

So actually does sound more of a bug, from that help info - so either a bug fix of a feature request to have the option or not to iclude filenames in keyword searches

anyway the proper place for this discussion is on the Picasa forum, so i'll leave it there.