universal photo tagging - almost

Based on Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2, photo tagging is tantalizingly near to standard interoperability.  Basically what is needed is

* all services/software should read from and write to standard IPTC fields (which are embedded along with the image file)

The IPTC just standardizes the location of the tags, not the tagging itself.
So e.g. for Picasa integration with Flikr, we need
- Picasa to write tags (labels) to IPTC
- Flikr to automatically read tags from IPTC
- automatic upload from Picasa to Flikr, with ability to filter tags (e.g. you may not want to upload tags that are only for personal use / only meaningful to you)

As a side-effect, Google image search could also start checking IPTC tags (if it doesn't already), for better search hits.

(Incidentally, if you haven't heard, Google just release Picasa 2, it is a free download, Windows only.)

They have a currently very sparse blog: picasa2.blogspot.com

There is more info at Controlled Vocabulary.com:
The IPTC standard
Image Databases

Comments

[Mark]

I have found ITag is one of the easiest applications for tagging photos with IPTC data.
It doesn't have search ability though.

http://www.itagsoftware.awswa.com/