SetAttr META tags: pasted tags cut off

Hi, tbone. The tags i am adding are mostly description of what is visible in those images. For example, wide angle shots can easily include more than 30-40 tags, like names of buildings, streets, trees, plants, animals, persons, types of ships & boats, names of the various canals or lakes, bridges, presence of clouds, ice, snow, or funny situations.

Basically, it helps me to find certain things, i otherwise would have to search manually, which is a very tough task having about 25.000 images (which isn't even that much, but it becomes more all the time). I also started to rate the images, but that's only a rough estimate so far, i will have to refine it. Since i couple of months i only give my main selction of images one star as a minimum, because when i start my rating's search "1 to 5 stars", it acts like a counter. That's much easier, than adding the file counts of each session folder using the Windows calculator, like i did first :slight_smile:.

Ok, tagging the images the way you describe it, seems to be quite time consuming, but you think it's worth it?
I have a similar amount of pictures taken, right now I put picture sets into dated folders (using a sensible name and "kind of"-tags in the foldername), but tagging for pictures is something I always thought would be a nice option.

I'm not sure if I may ask here, but:

  • You then search through your tagged images with the dopus search (using tags criteria)?.
  • How are these tags stored, are they put into the images directly or somehow into the filesystem?
  • Is there any other application out there, which is capable of making use of these tags? Is it some kind of standard, like for mp3 (i guess it's not)?

Thank you! o))

ps: I did not understand what you tried to achieve by giving 1 star to have some kind of counter, maybe you can give another explanation? o) I'm quite interested in how you and others manage their files, there's always something to learn! o)

Wondered if you live by the coast and then I saw "Hamburg", that makes perfect sense now. o))

Yep. As a hobby photographer, i can't complain about a lack of motifs.

Did you see my post before? o)

Oops, must have overlooked it, sorry.

For me, definitely. It is time consuming, yes, but i use it a lot. The most costly part was, when i started to tag all images, which was at a point i already had over maybe 10,000 images. But now, i have an average yield of around 50-100 images per session, it is a piece of cake - especially, because i use over 300 abbreviations, which save me a lot of time (using ac'tivAid to replace three to four letter abbreviations to expand to the full words, or sometimes even to whole groups of words), as well as having an optimized (thx to Opus & kundal's new dialog box) workflow.

Yes, that makes sense too. My folder descriptions contain only the rough locations i have been to, but i could also consider to add some keywords i could search for (which don't have to be visible). I hope, that the FAYT will get expanded, so that it would also fully work, when i sort be those description fields (that is, highlighting the matching parts). Right now it kind of works, stepping through using F3, but no highlighting exept for FAYTing by name.

[quote]I'm not sure if I may ask here, but:

  • You then search through your tagged images with the dopus search (using tags criteria)?.[/quote]

This is what i use:

FIND IN "K:\Bilder" QUERY {dlgstring|find in K} /home\dopusrt.exe /cmd Set SHOWFILTERFILENAME=*.jpg

I always prefer those small search boxes over the search panel.

Well, i guess they must be in the images, since they are retained, when i view them on some other computer.

Once i tried Adobe Bridge, but it had the drawback, that it can use only predefined tag words, which have to be created in advance. They also were incompatible with
Opus' tags system, in terms of compatibility: i couldn't add new tags using Opus, when the older tags were recorded through Bridge. Instead, i had to overwrite the old
tags & apply them anew.[/quote]

Once i started to go through all the photo session folders, suing the calculator to add up the number of valid images (i often have folders with "outtakes", having no star at all), which was too cumbersome. Then i started to rate the pictures, maybe two thirds of them. Since a couple of months i started to apply at least one minimum star (i plan to refine / evaluate the exact rating later), so i could always do a quick count. The command i use is

Find QUERY Bewertung:>=*

This code will catch all images with ratings between 1 & 5 stars. Note, that the syntax for the according query in english versions of Windows is quite a bit different, so this syntax example works works rather with the german version of Windows 7.

Thank you very much for your very detailed explanation!

I will investigate further on that tag-format and how it maybe used by other applications before giving this a go. Right now I assume this is a basic exif-information string, but what do I know. Maybe Leo or Jon can shed some light onto this? Hello, are you listening? o)
I run a website with access to my full image/photo collection, if those tag information could also be used by that web-thing, it would make up a nice basis for having some kind of search-functionality there too.

Do you know how long a filesystem-search through your 25k images takes for a tag-lookup?

It is very fast, like 2-3 seconds, due to the fact, that i use a special command which starts searching in my photos folder right away
instead to run a search over all drives.

Thank you Abr! o) Yes, 2-3 seconds is quite ok I think.

I had some little test and research with these "tags", they seem to be integrated into the filesystem, because you can tag not just only images, but basically any file there is. So in case you would copy your images to some fat32 or linux ext2/ext3 filesystem device, all tags will be lost.

Additionally, when using windows explorer to have a look at file tags (you can add a column "tags" there as well), the tags given by dopus will not show up there, is that the same for you?

[quote="tbone"]Thank you Abr! o) Yes, 2-3 seconds is quite ok I think.

I had some little test and research with these "tags", they seem to be integrated into the filesystem, because you can tag not just only images, but basically any file there is. So in case you would copy your images to some fat32 or linux ext2/ext3 filesystem device, all tags will be lost.[/quote]

Yes, that would be the case.

No, if i activate the field "Markierungen", i can see the tags ok here in my Explorer. Maybe you've tried another field, "Beschreibungen"?

I opened a thread for this tag-issue, I kind of overstressed this thread with offtopic-topics enough, I guess? o)))

Thank you for your help and kind explanations! They really got me some new ideas and things to explore!..o)

No, not at all. Funny, but there seam to be only a few people using Opus to work with tags for photographs. So it's completely fine with me to talk about various aspects
of tagging here. By the way, did the "Markierungen" column work for you?

No I did not have any more testings with columns, I focused more on meta-information is actually stored by dopus and explorer and did make some findings already:

What surely is of interest to you, who has a tagged image library:
DOpus does not necessarily store tags in the ntfs filesystem for image files (I tried png and jpg at least). I did some binary file comparison between equal images and different tags and additionally did not find ntfs information stored for these kind of files. But for files not carrying some kind of meta-data container right from the start, let's say simple txt-files, DO does uses (already mentioned?) ntfs alternate data streams to get the information saved.

Now in case you use some kind of raw-picture format DO probably not (yet) knows about, it may still use ntfs for your tags. I hope to find some more detail on what method DO uses for the various file types and image formats - just to be able to estimate what makes best sense to do, regarding usage of tags in the future for me.