Digital photography & design software forum: I have too much photo software

Hi sewut.

I assume you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista. You didn't say.

It looks like you think that each software stores your photos somewhere. That is not normally the case. Your photos are stored in a folder on your computer, wherever you saved them to.

The software you use just accesses that folder, (or those folders if you use different ones), to make their own list of photos, something like a media player's Playlist of mp3 tracks. The playlist is just a list. The mp3 tracks could be anywhere on the computer.

In Windows XP the operating System normally defaults saving image files to your "My Pictures" folder, accessible through your My Documents folder. Have a look in there.

I can't help you with the captions. This seems to be an option used specifically by Kodak in their software created playlists. As long as you keep that Kodak software installed, then you will be able to create/amend/delete captions for your photos. I am surprised that Kodak say the playlist cannot be exported though.

Mark

Windows Live Photo Gallery, like most other photo managers, is focused on tagging. While captions usually involve full sentences about the picture, useful for those reliving old memories, tagging is where you write just key words, separated by commas or semicolons, about the photo to make it easier to find/sort them in the future.

Caption: Mark, his wife, and seven children at Disney World in May, 2008. Little Timmy lost it on the roller coaster.
Tags: Disney World, Little Timmy, roller coaster, vacation, trip, Mark, 2008, May

Then you'll see categories appear, named for those tags. If you click on, say, vacation, you'll see all photos marked with the Vacation tag, or select 2008 to view all photos taken in 2008. It's quite a different approach and your choice depends on our specific desires.

John

Sorry about the necropost, but Windows Live Photo Gallery does have a caption you can add to the photo. It is in the middle of the right side bar. If the side bar is not there, click on the Info tab at the top. WLPG saves it's tags and captions as metadata, so they are saved with the file. I don't know if the caption feature was recently added or updated, but it's there.

Great info, thanks. I've just checked on Picasa and I think it will suit my needs well. As soon as I saw "Picasa creates captions the way journalists do - using the IPTC standard. That
means your captions are saved along with the photos and stay with them," I knew it was the one. Love at first site?

On one of my regular chat hangouts, all the Europeans use Picasa.

Anyway, I've got some work ahead of me but expect that I'll be happy with the results of transferring (and doing some rewriting) all to Picasa.

Thanks again.

Lisa in Campbell CA