While files were copying, I researched photo applications (again). I do this every once in a while- but I have never found anything that was perfect. I would be willing to pay for software, but I don’t think the perfect program actually exists. You’d think I would be at an advantage, being able to choose from linux and windows software.

Here is my list of wants:

• Allows upload to Flickr in the most painless way possible.
• Allows tags, and those tags must also upload to Flickr so I don’t have to tag twice. It must also embed tags in the photo itself in some kind of standard way.
• Allows me to view photos by date, or by folder, by camera, or other metadata.
• Allow for easy import and sorting of incoming photos (including tagging on import if possible).
• Allow for basic fixes- color correction, cropping, brightness/contrast, etc.
• Not 100% necessary, but I really like some kind of straightening feature (Picassa and F-Spot have this) because I tend to take crooked pics.

I was thinking the new Windows Live Photo Gallery would do most of this for me. They released a new version that allows uploading to Flickr, but it messes with the metadata- in particular, the tags don’t come through and the “date taken” metadata changes to the date uploaded on Flickr, which would be really annoying. (Maybe this stuff works on Vista, but it didn’t for me on XP.)

So, I’m back to F-Spot, the program I have been using for some time on Ubuntu. It does most of the above. I really wanted to use the Windows computer for photos, because Geoff and I both do photo editing, but no luck. F-Spot will work just fine if I use it to directly import pics from the camera- though I have not checked to see if it has RAW support yet (a lot of my older photos are in RAW format.) Maybe I’m naive in trying to use one program to do it all. I just want to simplify my workflow and make it so I can actually find my photos. The nice thing about F-Spot is that it will embed metadata right in the photos, so I can find them in my system by using Beagle. (And yes, mac people, I know iPhoto can probably do everything I want. Maybe someday I’ll be able to afford one…)

Assuming that  eventually I get all my photos cleaned up and in the same place, I plan to use Rsync to back them up to the Windows computer.

If anyone has any other recommendations on photo management or backup solutions, I’d love to hear them. If you have a mac, feel free to tell me about all the great features iPhoto has (or another mac program)- at least maybe I could look forward to a day in the future when I can have one program to do it all.