Data Import

No matter how good is a photo management system if lacks of an intuitive data import mechanism. Uploading your photos is the easy part (some systems will automatically search your hard drives for photos), captioning them is more difficult but filling out the shooting information is mind boring. That takes at least a minute per photo, multiplied by 5000.

Photo Organizer attempts to ease this process by implementing bulk upload with XML photo description. Rather than clicking through a graphical interface, you simply create a description file, which is then interpreted by Photo Organizer at upload time.

Importing shooting data

Photo Organizer attempts to ease this process by implementing bulk upload with XML photo description. Rather than clicking through a graphical interface, you simply create a description file, which is then interpreted by Photo Organizer at upload time.

Photo Organizer provides tools to convert Nikon Photo Secretary, SoftTALK and Gicon shooting data files into XML. This format is far superior to any of mentioned data formats, because it can couple the image file (or the physical slide) with the actual shooting data. Additionally XML allows Photo Organizer to maintain compatibility between software version. Unlike other formats, XML doesn't require the presence of all data fields, it's is indefinitely extensible and the Photo Organizer's XML parser will support all shooting data versions saved in XML.

While this might sound strange for those not interested in computer science, it is a very simple way of describing your photos. If you take a look at an XML file, you will realize that XML stores the shooting data in an transparent manner.

During upload EXIF, IPTC and XMP fields are also extracted and stored in the database. Unfortunately the EXIF fields are a real pain to deal with, because as many manufacturers as many EXIF fields exist. We have tested the software with 12 camera manufacturers and 47 camera types and found that the EXIF parser works fine, however there is a slight possibility that your camera is not supported or that not all Photo Shop EXIF fields will be recognized. Should this happen, please support the project by sending sample image files to the developers.