TAGS PROBLEM

the ink monitor · Post by **the ink monitor** » Fri Jul 03, 2009 11:26 am

Help PLEASE for a Newbie to this forum - (Hello everyone!)

Cannot get the tags feature in the Organiser to work properly, as it will place tags from the main tags list into the tags list under the General Info that do not relate to that photo, and despite me then deleting them they reappear when I next open that same photo.

ALSO cannot delete any tags from the main list - it seems that once they are in that list you are stuck with them for ever!

Have tried the only update available and many other things but simply cannot cure it from doing this.

Surely I'm not the only one with this problem?

allicorn · Post by **allicorn** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 2:06 pm

Hiya,

Just had a quick fiddle around with the tags feature and it seems to work okay. TBH this is the first time I've ever even touched it; I find the Organizer so inconvenient and buggy that I just don't open it anymore. I used to adore the old PSP X1 version.

Anyway, a quick test and images seem to retain only the tags I give them and deleting tags from the folding list in the left pane seems to work ok.

Sorry I can't be more help!

Alli

allicorn · Post by **allicorn** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 2:25 pm

Hmm - hang on a second here. I went back in - with long stick in hand - to poke around this unfamiliar tagging interface a little more and did manage to get myself into a situation where I thought I'd deleted a tag but I could still see it.

For completeness' sakes, I'm doing this:

* click image to highlight it
* click tag I want to remove in the tags pane on the right, it lights up blue
* click the Delete icon next to that pane, the tag disappears and is no longer associated with the image

The tag still exists in the main list of tags at the left of the screen at that point, even if there are now no images that are using it. To remove it from the list I have to:

* click the tag in the main left list, it lights up blue
* right click the blue lit tag to produce a little menu
* click "Delete", the tag disappears from the list - and here's the interesting bit - but IS NOT removed from any images that it was used on - oh ho!

That may be Corel's intention I suppose, but it seems a bit weird. If this is the same thing you're getting then I agree it looks like a bug.

Removing the tag from any images it was used in before you delete it from the main left list seems to make everything work just fine but if you had more than the handful of images I'm testing with then I guess that'd be a total pain.

I'm afraid I don't see any convenient way to work around the problem and I don't currently know where PSP is storing this tagging information either. I do have "write a replacement for the cruddy Organizer" on my todo list but I'm kinda swamped at the mo and it's been there for some time already

Alli

pdxrjt · Post by **pdxrjt** » Tue Jul 07, 2009 1:09 am

Well, I am not sure exactly what tag issues have been found by different folks. My biggest one is that repeats of tags exist. I have a tag... Family (no spaces after the y) ...I have several batches of photos with this tag. I add it to say, the 4th batch, and suddenly there are TWO Family (again, being sure there are no spaces etc.) tags. They both show all of the Family pics. Deleting one has worked at times and not others...... this has only happened a few times with 3-4 different tags. Very strange.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Tue Jul 07, 2009 12:48 pm

allicorn wrote:......

* click the tag in the main left list, it lights up blue
* right click the blue lit tag to produce a little menu
* click "Delete", the tag disappears from the list - and here's the interesting bit - but IS NOT removed from any images that it was used on - oh ho!

.......

I think this is the normal behaviour of any "tagging" software. the "Tag" is kept within the image itself and so you could move an image to another computer or even drop it onto a CD/DVD and it would retain the tag. The List of tags is a convenience list so that you don't have to keep typing the entire tag every time you tag something - sort of a glorified copy/paste.

Take for example a whole bunch of photos that I want to tag with the names of individuals who appear in that photo. Sometimes there could be several pictures all with the same participants.
e.g.
Keith Heather CarlJ Rebecca Liam Christine AlisonB Ryan
Now that would be a lot of typing for every picture, so having a tag that can be simply dropped onto the image is a lot quicker.

allicorn · Post by **allicorn** » Tue Jul 07, 2009 2:56 pm

Ah, gotcha okay SJJ. Copied a tagged file to test this and you're of course right.

I pretty much grew up in - and for a long time worked in - libraries and the arbitrariness of "tagging" as a classification scheme has always horrified me. I like my indexes canonical goshdarnit!

Alli

the ink monitor · Post by **the ink monitor** » Fri Jul 10, 2009 12:03 pm

Thanks for all your observations everyone - and each of you seems to have a different snag of some sort regarding the tags.
Personally I think it is something that Corel hasn't resolved within the program, which is a shame as it looks such a good idea on paper, especially if you have hundreds and hundreds (and let's face it who doesn't these days with free-for-all digital cameras) of photos to sort and index.

I tried to resolve this with Corel but they wouldn't answer my query as an individual because I use PSP primarily in a school and this constitutes us being a commercial user! So when I finally got to speak to someone here in the UK they would only answer questions at ten pounds each(!!), which smacks to me of 'rip-off'when I am not asking how to do something in PSP but believe there is something wrong with the software and want to know how to resolve it.
I understand that there is some new European legislation coming out to stop software companies hiding behind emails and not giving straightforward answers to technical hitches in their software, and I say it cannot come too soon!

Just to add to this tags problem - on my home computer PSP X2 has taken to scouring through my entire hard drive and adding ANY tags it can lay its hands on including (for some reason) all the tags from a Dreamweaver CS3 web course I did on-line a couple of years ago!!

I think allicorn may have hit on part of the problem with:
"Removing the tag from any images it was used in before you delete it from the main left list seems to make everything work just fine but if you had more than the handful of images I'm testing with then I guess that'd be a total pain."
Because I think what maybe happening in part is that (and I hope I'm reading you right here allicorn) if you have, say, two photos with the same tag(s) and decide to change the tags on one photo but still have the other photo in the Organiser then it will keep adding deleted tags back as long as the other photo with same tags is in the system.
I hope you can follow me there.

Whatever, I wish Corel had never introduced it/them and can only look back with fond memories of when life was simpler with PSP 9 and the standard Browser.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:41 am

Let me try and explain "Tags" and hopefully it will all make sense.
Firstly take a look at my system to Organise your pictures on your Hard Drive
and in particular the second post I made Using Comments.

Currently I have around about 15,000 photographs on my hard drive - and duplicated on other computers as a fail safe against disaster. You can see how I initially organise the photographs into neat little albums to coincide with the date and location they were taken. I then use the computers powerful cross referencing abilities to help retrieve albums.

In the second part of the thread you will see that I then "Add Comments" to the photographs. In fact you can use any of the following fields - they are all searchable using nothing more than Windows Explorer and the "Search Assistant".

Now you can search for any photographs containing an individual by name
such as
Steve
Alli
Ron
Ken
and so on.

These fields are in fact "Tags" - you tag the photograph with some extra information - rather like the old days where your grand parents would write notes onto the back of a photograph, typically the date and location, possibly even the event, plus the names of people in the picture.

Lots of information is placed into a photograph automatically by digital cameras - known as EXIF information. Typically this information will include the make and model of the camera, show if flash was used, F Stop number, exposure time, ISO speed and several more things.
You then have a few extra fields where you can make your own notes to record the things I mentioned above.

I have for the past few weeks been going through my several thousand photographs and inserting the names of individuals in the photographs.
Next time "Aunty Flo" comes round to visit and my wife insists I get a few pictures of "Aunty Flo" to show her, this will be simply a matter of performing a Windows Search to produce an instant slide show.

To assist me with the task I have hunted around the internet looking for "tagging" software that will help make the job easier. I have also discovered that Vista allows more flexibility than XP and includes more of these EXIF fields than its predecessor. One such item is the "Camera Make" and the "Camera Model" - fixed in XP but using Vista I was able to alter this information. This is useful for old photographs that have been scanned. The scanner does not add details of itself like a digital camera and so I was able to do so manually by using Vista.

To prevent me from straying off the subject too far, back to "Tags."
I wanted to try and find software that would update the actual "Windows" fields shown in the screen shot below

The one thing I DO NOT like about the "Tags" created by software - such as PhotoImpact, PaintShop Pro, Picasa and dozens of other similar programs is that those programs might not be around in 10 years time.
Tags that are specific to a certain software program can only normally be read (and therefore searched) by that particular software program.
Tags (or comments) that are built into the windows operating system are likely to stay around a lot longer (hopefully infinitely). Windows tags will also be searchable on any windows computer so that you are not relying on friends/relatives owning the same third party software as yourself.

The nearest thing I found to what I was looking for was Quick Exif Writer
where you can see from this screen shot you get a large display of the picture and then two fields below where you can enter the tag / comment information

Alas - despite testing it out on two different computers it didn't do what it says on the can - I got the impression someone made an attempt to create the software but perhaps didn't quite have the skills to finish off the job.

This EXIF information, including tags, comments and so on is a part of the image file. whilst on screen you "see the picture" by right clicking and checking the properties, you find all this other information, most of which is searchable. Because this information is saved in the actual picture - wherever that picture goes, that information goes with it. Email it, copy it to a USB stick, plonk it on a DVD, save a copy on the internet - no matter what you do with it, that extra information goes with it.

What I have discovered is that third party software - such as photoimpact, photoshop, paint shop pro, picasa and so on will add its own "tags" fields and not simply use the built in "Windows Operating System" fields. Therefore to retrieve those third party tags, you need the third party program that created them. Tag a picture with PSP and give a copy of that picture to a friend who does not have PSP and your friend will never know the tag exists (unlike using the built in Windows tags.)

Many of these third party programs - including Paint shop Pro, allow you to create lists of tags so that you can quickly re-use a ready made tag rather than having to keep typing the same information time and again as you tag several pictures. As I said in my original post - these lists are a form of glorified copy/paste.

Using Windows Explorer I am able to select several photographs and tag them all at once - great if you did a photo shoot of one certain individual and had perhaps 50 photographs of him/her - you select all 50 and tag them in one step rather than doing picture one by one.

allicorn · Post by **allicorn** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 7:19 am

Nice Steve, very informative!

One quick note is that I believe during my testing I found that tags added by PSP do actually go into the Windows file property field called "keywords". So - at least in the case of PSP - the software has decided to play nice with the operating system's way of doing things.

Alli

pdxrjt · Post by **pdxrjt** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 3:04 pm

Great information. While I use tags on every picture, I am also a believer in organizing my pictures.... in a manner very similar to the one in the link. Of course, that doesn't help when I am looking for pics of "Fred" which may be spread out over multiple folders, but when I want to examine my first trip to New Orleans, I know right where to find it!

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 4:31 pm

pdxrjt wrote:... Of course, that doesn't help when I am looking for pics of "Fred" which may be spread out over multiple folders, ....

That is the beauty of using the comments fields I mentioned.
The Windows Search Assistant will search across various folders or even the entire computer - search as you would for any other item on your computer.
Any pictures where you have put "fred" in the comments field or even the title will be found by searching for the keyword fred.

You can view the search results as a slide show by selecting thumbnail view.
You can even select all / copy / paste into a temporary directory.

pdxrjt · Post by **pdxrjt** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 2:40 pm

No question.... using the comments would be a great idea. The question is when do you switch methods? Using comments would ignore my earlier photos and be a heck of a lot of work to fix them. At times, I wish I were a programmer and could find a way to search for PSP tags and convert them to comments! Alas, far beyond my reach.

I'll have to seriously consider using comments on my next batch.

allicorn · Post by **allicorn** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 4:19 pm

You might want to check this Pdxrjt, but what I'm seeing is that tags added in PSP go into the "keywords" field instead of the "comments" field. This is fine! You can still use all the clever tricks and setup that Steve suggests and the Windows Search-for-files-and-folders thing works just fine with the tags in the keywords box instead of comments.

So, if you've got a bunch of images with tags already added to them from within PSP, you should be able to switch to Steve's system right away without losing anything just by setting up your preferred folder structure and doing a bit of searches+cut'n'paste to organize the images you already have.

Still won't be a tiny job if you have a whole heap of images, but shouldn't be too bad since those tags ought to be searchable from Windows.

Alli

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:46 pm

As Alli has stated, the PSP tags are searchable using windows, so existing photos will be OK left as they are. It doesn't really matter too much which of the available fields contain your keywords providing a search using the Windows Search Assistant finds them (easy enough to establish - just carry out a search!)

For new photographs, it is a matter of using whichever method you find the easiest. My only suggestion is to ensure a search with the windows search assistant finds them, otherwise you fall into the trap of being tied to a specific item of third party software with the issues I have already mentioned above.

pdxrjt · Post by **pdxrjt** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 12:11 am

Going to try that out! Thanks for the info. One problem I have (as computers morph and change capacity) is when to switch to new systems/methods.... sounds like this may be solved in this case!!