I am looking for something like this since I started digital photography. Exiftool is a great Tool and I managed to write some shell scripts for basic tagging.
A GUI with tag-presets and other bells and whistles would be really helpfull.

Keep up your work.

Yes indeed, you want the moon on a stick. But your views and mine have a lot of common points.

Metadata templates will be a main feature of Sagittarius, but only from 0.2, or 0.3 release (i’m currently finishing 0.1a). As I imagine it, the user could create and save as many templates as wanted, and apply them on the selected photos. Templates will only update fields the user want to, so you can have one for creator/copyright info, and a second for a specific location, a third for people and so on.

Well, about taxonomy, it wont be implemented in Sagittarius for a while, if ever. I’m thinking of a hierarchical keyword database that the user can edit, but i don’t think that I would have the time to make it soon. On the first few releases there will be only the option of arbitrary keywords.

We are talking about a software that is only in the phase of planning, it is likely that it won’t suit all your needs for the next half year.

You should maybe try digiKam or blueMarine.

Vivosz

I have been looking for a solution to this problem for some time… I’d like to have a tool to fit into the workflow that helps me to update the metadata with all sorts of information for cataloguing the photos. I see many stock agencies that require metadata and good tagging these days – and need it done by the photographer. So I’m looking at a simplified way to achieve this… And I’m not interested in editing every photo one at a time – I’d much rather do it all in bulk as quickly as possible.
I’m looking for something along the lines of Opanda (from my limited quick web-review) with a few extras included.

Not that I want the moon on a stick or anything but the following would be very useful. And so far, I can’t see anything that allows Linux users to do these… Do you know of alternatives?

1. There are always some data that could be stored in template (top pane of the window) for bulk application to a bunch of files:- name, e-mail address, copyright info, rights usage etc. Just change the template data when you need to… Click a button and all photos get this data.
2. As an enthusiastic amateur, when I take photos, I take lots of photos. So they’re all usually in the same location, probably of the same thing/person, on the same date etc. I’d like an option to fill in a secondary template/pane containing:- Country, state/county, town, location, people/models in the pictures etc since most of this would be the same for all photos in a session/folder. One click applies the metadata to all images in the folder.
3. To aid with cataloguing, I also would like to see a simplified taxonomy plug-in that allows you to pick up Flora/Fauna or whatever is your favourite classification system from the ones floating on the net… This could be as simple as an XML file that contains the cataloguing classifications. This should allow you to get down to proper (latin?) names of whatever the animal or plant is in your photos within a few clicks on a drop-down menu system. Then again, one click applies that keyword to all selected photos… This could also be customisable so that over time you can build up multiple classifications/taxonomies of your family and friends, or computer parts, bridges, buildings, birds photographed or whatever it is that you photograph so that their names can be easily selected through drop-down menus and added as metadata.
4. Then there should be the possibility to arbitrarily enter additional keywords to ensure that all areas are covered… (dates of construction, builder, original owners etc etc)…
5. I did wonder if this should be set up in some form of spreadsheet so that having applied the data by a button to some of the photos, you could just drag from a cell corner downwards to apply the same data to all those below that need it. This might be useful actually since it would potentially make it easier to concatenate all the keywords into one line/cell for pushing into the metadata of the photos.

As I said, I want the moon on a stick. But I’m sure it could be done. I’d be interested to hear your views on these comments. Is this the sort of thing that you need too for your purposes? Do you know of alternatives that might achieve the same thing?

Thanks. Keep up the good work. Looks impressive so far – looking forward to the release.

Mark.