What is so complicated about a putting a comment in a photo?

It was my wife’s parent’s 50th and it seemed a nice idea to get a few old pictures scanned for a book. But then seeing the state of some of the pictures and knowing that in a few years many may be beyond repair and/or lost as lives moved on, I thought it would be sensible to make a digital copy of the best pictures to share with everyone.
But who were these people? Where were they taken? When were they taken? Being my wife’s family, I didn’t even recognise my wife as a child let alone cousins and long dead relatives. So, it was obvious I had to record these details.
And the answer seemed obvious. My Canon camera came with software called Zoombrowser Ex which had a facility to add tags or keywords.  There are four categories “people, places, events & Other”. So, I started adding a few tags … then I wondered how anyone I sent the pictures to would see the tags … or failing that, how I could list the details of the pictures I sent. Which is when I realised that Zoombrowser doesn’t store this information in the picture but instead creates another file, which cannot be read except by the same version of Zoombrowser. Which makes it all but useless for my purpose.
But, redemption seemed to come from Google Picasa. Picasa is fantastic fun as it has face recognition software which means it tags the pictures with the name … and after a little research I found it has the option to store the tags in the picture. GREAT! … no! After trying it out, Yes! it tags the pictures, but NO!!!!! it seems all but impossible to get it to tag the pictures.
But worse! If you can persuade it to store the tag in the picture … and I did manage it once by editing the picture … but I’ve now lost the knack. It stores it in an incompatible was as follows:
In the pictures is a region, this region is defined by a rectangle, and it may have the following properties, …. of which one may be a name.
This according to google is the way they will tag the photos because “it is the standard which everyone will be adopting” BULLSHIT!!! Why? Unless you have automatic face recognition software, which can automatically works out the rectangle no one else is going to go through the exercise of detailing the precise region occupied by each individual. Almost everyone else is going to just have a list of names in the picture. So, to use the google “standard”, you have to create a fake “region” as a region is the only way to store a person’s name DAFT TWATS!!!  ANY SANE person would do it the other way around. They would record the names of each person of which SOME, MAY (if you are lucky and perhaps added later) may contain a region locating their face. So, I am absolutely sure no one else is going to follow the insane ideas of google. So, even if I could get picasa to update the file, in a few years time when everyone else has adopted a more sensible approach, the files records used by picasa will be redundant and unreadable by most software.
Which made some new software from Canon called “imagebrowser” seem really good, because this one works with what are called IPTC fields in images such as jpg, ti. This stores information in the picture, and that must mean other software can access?  (Note, it does not work with png as I found out to my cost and had to convert everything to tif).
And, so I sat down to write down the basic details in the comment field in imagebrowser … even though imagebrowser is some of the worst software I have seen for browsing images (most reviews give it five 1stars out of 5) … but that wasn’t the worst of it. When I got some software called EXIFtool, just to check how the information was being stored, I found that imagebrowser only stores some information in the IPTC or XMP fields. And unfortunately, the one key field which I thought might be common (comment) doesn’t get stored. (head in hands moment)
And let me not forget to mention before I forget, my original interest arose because I have some software on a website that automatically displays a title from the IPTC information … with the only small problem being I’ve yet to find any software to create the title!
So what do I really want?
Which brings me to the purpose of this post. Google are notorious for not listening to customers, so I’m not bothering to contact them. Canon are notorious for intentionally (at least that is what it seems to me) preventing their cameras working with third party lenses … so the idea of Canon listening to pleas to get their software working with anyone else seems daft. So, I’m left with a wish list and no one I think will listen …. but perhaps being the web it might just be found??

1. First, let’s start with the basics: I want to connect my camera and download images to a folder on my laptop called 2013 with subfolders called 2012-1-7 (for today). This is so that when I view them in explorer, when displayed alphabetically they are in date order.
2. Next, as I run out of space, I want to store some photos on a shared network drive (and it allows others in the family to see them)
3. Next I want to add notes to each folder. Perhaps I even want to tag folders, but I also need to be able to find folders and to do this I’ve had to start using “Agent Ransack” as windows search is appalling (at least since XP). At the moment folders just get a longer name e.g. 2012-12-13 Visit to park
4. Now for the important part, I want some software to quickly and easily go through my photos reviewing them, categorising them and deciding which ones to delete (or more usually, which ones to keep). The only way I’ve managed to do this is to use the star rating giving photos tagged for deletion a one star. This however means I can’t use the one star rating … and e.g. if I’ve taken a lot of very good pictures, I may actually end up deleting dozens of five-star pictures and if I really need a picture as it is the only one, I may end up keeping really awful ones.
5. Then I want to create a slide show. Strangely, I don’t always want to display them in the order they were taken!! Sometimes I may even want to take pictures from vastly different folders.
6. Now …. months later, I want to find pictures. At present, the only way I can do this is by searching for the folder name. E.g. “2012-10-25 XXX’s Birthday”. But if it’s a place I visit regularly, I may have dozens of folders … and many have been moved to a network drive to save space on the laptop. But zoombroswer doesn’t work with network drives. Imagebrowser is just awful, picasa seems to have a mind of its own and it’s more like a face-recognition game than useful sofware. NONE OF THEM RECOGNISE INFORMATION CREATED IN THE OTHER APPLICATIONS. And, I’ve not dared to look at Micro$oft — which is always incompatible with everyone as a way of forcing people to go down the Micro$oft root.
7. So, I want a way to quickly and easily tag whole loads of photos. I want to select all the photos in a pariticular place … add a tag. Select all the photos taken for a particular purpose ADD ANOTHER TAG (imagebrowser only allows one tag). I really would like face-recognition to make adding people tags easy (but I want to turn it off when the photo is the village gala!!! Because

So These are the records I want:

• Title (aka caption) … this is short text that would go underneath the image
• Comment (aka notes) … this is longer text or more obscure text.
• Location name (text)
• Location field (lat/long, grid reference, nearest named place)
• Location tag (a selection from a list)
• Event name (text)
• Event tag (a selection from a list)
• Date (for older scanned images this has to be added and is subtly different from creation date)
• Person1 Name (+ if available where they are located &/or comment like “top left”)
• Person2, Person3, Person4 etc.
• Tag1
• Tag2
• Tag3, etc. (i.e. multiple tags)

Note: Actually, the tags might be better organised as “Group1.tag1; group1.tag2; group2.tag1 etc. So, that similar tags are collected together under one grouping rather than being disorganised.
Finding pictures.
The simplest thing is to see all photos which have a particular tag. Or perhaps to find all photos of a particular star rating, with a particular tag in a particular location within a particular date range. More advanced searches would look for specific words in titles and comments.
BUT THE NAMES AND DESCRIPTION ARE MOST IMPORTANT!!!
Why on earth can’t I list the names in a picture and give a brief title to every picture and have every bit of software understand it? Why can’t I look for pictures with certain individuals? Why can’t I search for pictures with certain keywords? Why does google insist on going down a deadend road and call it “the future?” Why haven’t I even bothered to check out Micro$oft because it is never compatible?
We really owe it to future generations!
Let me finish by saying I spent Christmas going through my father’s old 3.5inch floppies. The experience was horrific. Even if I could work out the meaning of the file names, I usually could not read them. Even if I could open them up, often it would be garbage. I ended up getting very angry … with someone who was dead … and who actually did a very good job catalogging them … except in the last decade the catalog has disappeared and no one knows where or even if, there is the “MY DOCUMENTS” kind of disk full of personal things we may want to keep (or perhaps when disks were reused, the only sensible storage was the final printout?)
It took almost a week to go through these 1000 disks only to discover that almost all of it was rubbish and if there had been useful stuff, it was either unreadable or perhaps worse … stored on media like magnetic tapes which we no longer had the means to read. He only died a decade ago, but it is already a nightmare trying to recover the material.
We have a similar problem with old videos, with old slides, with old photos which are now stored in boxes in the loft. I can now see months being taken up trying to recover videos of my own children as babies.
Our generation is creating a nightmare for our children. We are going to have boxes and boxes and disk drive after drive or incompatible material where no one can see the important material from the utter dross. Unfortunately, the easier it becomes to store information, the more it needs to be organised to be of any utility to anyone else.
At least, when you have a small box of precious photos, everyone knows that THESE ARE THE PHOTOS TO KEEP. Now, those precious photos are literally hidden in a haystack of other material.

Unless our generation pulls its socks up and finds a way to ensure that future generations can actually reliably find, read and understand what we produce … we may as well throw it all away! Because the reality is that we are creating a massive massive headache and an enormous heartache for our loved ones.