Anyone suggest a piece of software that will allow us to organize
our jewelry photos w/ individual captions. Need to be able to
expand image on screen and hopefully do slide shows. Have Picassa
which is great, does everything except seems like you can’t caption
the image. We want to use this to catalogue several hundred images
and be able to use in custom order presentations.
Richard
Hi Richard,
Anyone suggest a piece of software that will allow us to organize our jewelry photos w/ individual captions.
Microsoft’s Power Point is made for that. Unfortunately, it comes
as part of the Office Suite which is very expensive. On the other
hand, the other Office applications (including Word and Excel) are
well worth having.
Beth
I have used IrfanView for years. It is free very powerful. I use it
for executable slide shows batch convertions, resize, batch create
thumbnails, move images to new folders, view in thumbnails and much
more. You can download it here and get a complete discription
Enjoy
Jeff Dunnington
Filemaker Pro would actually be ideal- powerpoint would be okay, but
it doesn’t allow easy organization. Filemaker would let someone put
together a bunch of photos with some categories and then enable them
to be searched and categorized (say by gem, jewelry, or metal type).
A database (like Filemaker) in general would be WAY more flexible
than presentation software (which Powerpoint is). And Filemaker is
cross-platform so Mac or PC doesn’t matter. There are other
databases available (download.com has a few) but Filemaker is simple
enough that anyone can sit down and make a decent catalog with
images without any unduly stressful work (probably 3 hours for a
complete novice).
Hello Richard,
With some reservations I’d like to suggest that you might want to
take a look at IMatch (http://www.photools.com/, US$50). I hesitate
slightly because IMatch is a large, powerful program that does many
things and can be user-programmed to do MANY more.
IMatch is really a database wherein an image is associated with the
digital photo details (as assigned by the camera when the shot was
taken) and whatever other data you want to assign to it (such as
descriptive details, price ranges, date of production, whatever). Add
to that tools for image editing, HTML page building, batch processing
of images (to size, frame, caption, watermark, etc), as well as a
myriad of ways to filter, sort and group images based on their various
properties and, finally, a Visual BASIC scripting language and editor
and you’ve got some idea of what IMatch is all about. It’s basically
image management and processing.
The database concept is central to IMatch so it’s not really intended
for one-by-one tweaks. I guess another way of saying this it that
IMatch isn’t is a program where you grab an image, type in some text,
drop the text onto your image and Save it. Other programs do that
sort of thing much better than you ever could with IMatch.
That said let me give an example of what I’ve done with IMatch that I
don’t think I could have done with any other image management
program. (I realize that this isn’t exactly the type of info you were
asking for but I’ve come this far on the subject so I may as well go
the distance.)
One of my areas of interest is ancient jewellery and it’s methods of
production. I’ve collected close to 1200 images of ancient pieces and
using IMatch have assigned a variety of properties to the images
including a “Methods of Work” property. “Methods of Work” would
include “cast”, “forged”, “riveted”, “enameled”, “granulation” and so
on.
Using the scripting facility of IMatch I wrote a “Find” script that
will allow me to search my image database for images that have one or
more given “Methods of Work”. To make a long story short I can search
for “Gold” “rings” that were “forged” and “enameled” … and I can
frame and caption those images and put up a web page of them and be
done in less than 30 minutes, all using IMatch. Of course it took me
a week to write my scripts and fiddle around figuring out how to do
things but there you go.
Whew! Guess I better stop or Hanuman will start charging me by the
word. 
Usual “me happy customer” disclaimers re IMatch.
Cheers,
Trevor F.
I’m not totally sure I understand what you are asking. All of my
image handling software allows me to name each photo - I have Adobe
Photoshop Elements (under $100 at Sam’s); Microsoft Picture It (also
under $100 at Sam’s); PhotoImpression; and Hewlett Packard’s photo
imaging software that comes with it’s printers/scanners. I unload my
digital or scanned photos into the correct folder, then click on the
title and change it to what I want. I usually list date, materials,
my cost, and retail. The HP software allows you to print album pages
with titles, if you wanted to actually print out your photos with
titles. I’ve never used Power Point, so don’t know if that handles
images differently or not.
Beth in SC
Converting my hundreds of custom slides to an image catalogue.
Probably break down by wedding bands, bracelets, diamond earrings,
etc. Want to add captions to slides which include labor time and
weight of materials, use for slide shows, email to clients,
printouts, etc. Tried Picasa which is great except for no caption
function.
Wondering who was using what in the way of software. Understand
there is a catalogue (Photoshop Album 2.0) program that interfaces
with Photoshop Elements seems like that is a likely choice as it
will allow tweaking of the scans. Anyone have experience with Album
2.0 or something else that works with Photoshop Elements?
Richard
I’ve used Adobe Album for organizing photos of my jewellery. It
allows you to add tags/keywords. It’s fairly inexpensive.
I think you can download a free version from Adobe, however it has
limited functionality compared to the payable version so you may not
be able to test the bit you’re interest in. See here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/starter.html there’s a
link on that download page that lists disabled features in the free
version.
Trying to catch up on posts…I come from a photography/graphics
background.
The best image organizers are Cumulus by Canto http://www.canto.com/
Or Portfolio by Extensis http://www.extensis.com
Of course, you would also need Photoshop for the image
manipulations.
I take it you don’t have a Mac as the free iPhoto is quite good.
Cheers, Leslie Nicole