Tagging and rating

Methods of finding and filtering photos.

Tagging an image with one or more keywords enables you to navigate through your collection for photos on a particular theme or of a particular place. All the packages reviewed here offer tagging, although one package is the clear favourite. While all enable you to assign any number of keywords, only digikam supports hierarchical keywords.

This way, for example, you could define a hierarchy that includes UK > Yorkshire > York > Minster, with obvious benefits. Rating, by use of stars, enables you to categorise your images according to their quality, so you can select only the best images of a particular subject. With the apparent exception of picty (but we can’t be certain because its manual is so incomplete), all the packages reviewed here offer this facility.

In addition to tags and ratings, all the software provides a means of adding various annotations. Included here are titles/ descriptions, the name of the photographer, copyright information and so on. In the case of Shotwell, this is just a comment, while the support provided by digikam, gthumb

and Xnview MP is the most comprehensive, and the others fall somewhere between. Digikam and Xnview MP allow a geolocation to be added to a photo. In the case of Xnview MP this is achieved by entering latitude and longitude, while digikam provides lots of options, including pin-pointing on a map.

Xnview MP offers an additional tagging scheme that some will find useful, providing five coloured categories named ‘important’, ‘personal’, ‘work’, ‘to do’ and ‘later’, plus ‘uncoloured’. Digikam provides similar functionality, although the colours don’t have pre-assigned meanings.