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[godavego]

I'm a long-time user of MC for all my audio needs.  I have thousands of files and several zones of playback.  Based on what I've used, MC is easily the easiest and best system to organize and play music.  Unfortunately, I can't say the same about photos.  My question is what do people do with photos?  I have almost as many digital photos as I do songs (12000+).  With MediaCenter, I can tag them, but that's about it.  Since I do a lot with the server, the files are not useful to the clients because my wife can't do anything with the files except look at them.  She wants to be able to email and edit them.  Plus, there are lots of programs that specialize in photos and do a much better job.

My problem is that I want the best of both worlds.  I want easy photo organization, integration with commercial printers, web album creation, etc., AND I want to be able to share all my files from my central server in a way that makes it easy for my wife to find the photo she wants.

Anyone have any strategies for this?  I don't want to maintain two sets of tags and albums.  Right now, I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to organize, edit, print, and publish my photos to my family web site.  The thing is I want a way to share the photos from my central server and display them, and Adobe can't do that.

I searched though the archives a bit, but I didn't find too much recent info.

My current plan is to use Adobe to organize everything and come up with a file naming scheme that helps locate photos.  Then, I will import the photos into MC so I can share them easily.  Hopefully, with the filenames, my wife can find files based on the location.

Anyone have a better option that lets me use all the power in Adobe and still be able to locate and share files in MC?  Is there a way to import/export tag information between the two programs?

[edit]
One thing to note is that I haven't done a lot of organizing yet.  I have an entire day set aside next week to get this all straighten out.  Till now, I've been doing things with some tagging in MC, but that isn't working out.

[JimH]

Maybe you could talk about what you want that MC doesn't do.

Are you tagging your photos?

Integration with a photo printing service is coming.

[godavego]

Some of the things that PS Elements gets me:

- It's built specifically for photos.  MC is awesome, but it's really about the music.  As a result of specialization, I find the UI easier to find/edit/print/etc. just about everything image related.

- The ability to publish a web photo album with a couple of clicks.  This will save me hours!

- Integration with services

- Printing options are vastly more extensive than MC.  This is not even a contest.

- Email sending is much easier (automatic resize etc.)

- When using MC with a remote library, you can do nothing with the files.  You can't edit them and you can't email them.  The MC client fails when you try.  This drives my wife and me nuts.

- Very slick date views.  I can find my photos using a calendar.

- Even without tags, I can find a photo in Elements in a few seconds.  I can't do that with MC.  Between the ease of date views and previews, it works really well.

- The integration with my camera is better.  With MC, I end up using multiple apps.

- Multiple album (or collections in Elements) levels.  For example, you can have a collection "Trip to Europe."  Them, you can have child collections "Italy," "France," "Favorites," etc.  I can do this with tages, but I end up stimping on each other.  With Elements, I have collections AND tags.

- Vewing information about photos is always available.  I haven't found a way to show the photo metadata in MC (camera, focal length, etc.).

Basically, this is not really a knock on MC.  It's just that I think MC may be trying to do too much.  For music, it's almost perfect.  For photos, I think it has a long way to go.  Unfortunately, like I said in my original post, I want the best of both worlds.

[JimH]

- The ability to publish a web photo album with a couple of clicks.  This will save me hours!
- Printing options are vastly more extensive than MC.  This is not even a contest.
- Email sending is much easier (automatic resize etc.)

Not sure what you want with printing, but try selecting any image or images, then right click and choose "Send To".   You'll find both e-mail and upload to Web or FTP server there.  Resizing is also there under options.

- When using MC with a remote library, you can do nothing with the files.  You can't edit them and you can't email them.  The MC client fails when you try.  This drives my wife and me nuts.

The client is read only to protect the data, but I'm not certain that you can't e-mail or upload even so.

- The integration with my camera is better.  With MC, I end up using multiple apps.

If you click on camera, you can acquire the images automatically.  What do you want there?

- Multiple album (or collections in Elements) levels.  For example, you can have a collection "Trip to Europe."  Them, you can have child collections "Italy," "France," "Favorites," etc.  I can do this with tages, but I end up stimping on each other.  With Elements, I have collections AND tags.

This is possible also.

- Vewing information about photos is always available.  I haven't found a way to show the photo metadata in MC (camera, focal length, etc.).

It may be there as an EXIF tag.

[RobOK]

Integration with a photo printing service is coming.

Can you say what service(s)?

My choices would be Shutterfly and Flickr.


EDIT: godvego, here is a similar thread I started.  http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=24138.0

[NickM]

Gone through the same pain.  A couple of things…

I don't understand why you need another application to get data from your camera to MC.  When you plug in the camera or insert the memory card, MC should recognise the external media.  For what it’s worth, I grab the files to a holding folder before cataloguing them later.

As far as organising with other applications, why not once you have finished your cataloguing  do a file rename based upon the tags (e.g. [date]_[time]_[Place] etc.).

nick

[IanG]

A while back there was a list of enhancement requests for MC 11 around printing, in camera preview etc.  Were any of them implemented?

Ian G.

[Jaguu]

In my opinion MC11 rates very well, when it comes to organizing images although a few things could be improved.

On the other hand godavego is quite right, when he says that you cannot do much with the images once stored in MC11 except printing, watching slide shows or uploading to some web server.

You cannot use your stored images for a cycling wallpaper nor as a screensaver, you cannot built nice menu driven cd's nor create specific photo albums to share with friends and so on. My preferred use case would be to create a very handy menu driven cd with a series of images, background music and sophisticated effects (like Photo Jam Pro) to hand out as a nice present to friends, so that they can insert the cd into their pc or dvd player and watch slide shows with a few simple clicks. You can do that with any 3rd party apps very well, but you always loose your sophisticated tagging information that is stored in MC11.

For all those things you need some 3rd party apps, but all those apps (that I looked at)have the drawback that they do not understand and do not import MC11 images tags. So if you have spent a lot of time tagging your images, you are loosing this information if you try to use your images with another app.

Of course, you can export all th information to some Excel file and import everything into a MySQL database. But then you will miss the very handy MC11 interface.

So it is a kind of a dog trying to catch his own tail.

[hit_ny]

Photos use EXIFs, are there any plans to allow MC to create, edit EXIF tags ??

This might avoid duplicating tags between apps.

[JimH]

We know about EXIF, but it wasn't enough for what MC needed.  We'll improve EXIF support in the future.

[IanG]

For all those things you need some 3rd party apps, but all those apps (that I looked at)have the drawback that they do not understand and do not import MC11 images tags. So if you have spent a lot of time tagging your images, you are loosing this information if you try to use your images with another app.

I don't understand that!  I've recently looked at slide show apps and haven't had any problems with tag info being lost!  On the other hand, I've found that you can often drag pictures or playlists of pictures from MC into the app.  For me, that's the ideal combination - use MC to organise / find the images and then use a dedicated app to process them the way I want.

Ian G.

[Jaguu]

Hi Ian,

would you mind go give some examples? When I looked around I did not find any.
I have to mention that I made heavily use of the freedom and flexibility that MC offers and did a lot of tagging with user defined fields, especially for my art collection.

Do you know any app that would display the tagging information stored inside MC11?
Let's say I want to make a slide show of paintings by Van Gogh and burn it to a cd.

I would like to insert the cd anywhere, have a menu displayed offering several options and then displaying the paintings as a slide show with all the tagging information that was stored in MC displayed as well?

With other apps I found that I can run a slide show with background music and have nice menu options and even nice transitions, but I would have to re-enter tag information by hand. It would not be imported and displayed automatically.

[IanG]

Hi Jaguu

I normaly use Vegas Movie Studio to work with video and stills, and MC works perfectly with that.  I wanted an app that would let me make quick and dirty slide show DVDs, but the only one I've got left on my PC is PhotoDVD.  It's exactly what I wanted, and again it works well with MC.  I'll try and remember some of the others I looked at and drop you a pm.

Cheers

Ian G.

[godavego]

Not sure what you want with printing, but try selecting any image or images, then right click and choose "Send To".   You'll find both e-mail and upload to Web or FTP server there.  Resizing is also there under options.The client is read only to protect the data, but I'm not certain that you can't e-mail or upload even so.If you click on camera, you can acquire the images automatically.  What do you want there?This is possible also.It may be there as an EXIF tag.

MC can certainly print, but these other apps give a lot more printing options.  For example, print pages of photos as an album, add frames, captions, etc.

I've posted the email from the client before.  Basically, it doesn't work.  The option is there on the menu, but when you select it, you get an error.  To get around it, I copy the filename, which includes the IP address of the server.  Then I replace that with a UNC name to a share on the server and open the directory where the file lives.  Finally, from there I can use a separate application to resize and email the photo.  It's a major pain compared to right-click, send email.

Downloading the photos works in MC.  It's just that in Elements it is much more integrated.  It's a one-step process instead of two (download, then import into library).

[JimH]

Downloading the photos works in MC.  It's just that in Elements it is much more integrated.  It's a one-step process instead of two (download, then import into library).

Hmmm... this isn't the case.  What are you doing?  The images are acquired and imported by plugging in the camera, turning it on, clicking camera in the Action Window and clicking acquire.

How could this be simpler?  We'd be happy to try.

[glynor]

I don't have much time to comment tonight on all of the Image-related things I'd like to see (and I've commented on some of them previously anyway), but...

* For printing, I would need to see ICC output profile support before I would use it.  Period.  Now, to be fair, I have a Professional-level RIP (Colorbyte's ImagePrint) and I don't know that I would use MC's printing options that often, but sometimes ImagePrint is overkill if I just want a quick proof...

* I need a quicker, less buried Send to method (for Photoshop).

* I would like to see the ability to visually select which images to import in-camera (I admit, I have been using Photoshop Elements for this recently...Was this added?)

* Full (or at least vastly improved) EXIF data support.  Including in-camera info (exposure, shutter speed, etc).

* Some "picture package" options for printing would be nice (templates that auto-generate 2 5x7s, 3 4x6s, wallets, etc for multiple pictures).  I would use this feature.  Currently I import the images into Photoshop Elements for this.

* It would be nice if the edit tools (crop, resize, rotate, brightness, etc) could be operated somehow from inside the "playing" window.  Possibly using some method similar to Apple's "Dashboard" they use with Motion?

EDIT:

I felt I should add.  Do I expect to get features like end-to-end color management and automated picture packaging in a program I paid $10 to buy an upgrade licence for?  No.  Not at all.

Do I want them anyway, and would I use them if they were added?  Absolutely!  But I'm not exactly always a reasonable man...