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In Search Of App Capable Of Advanced Indexing, Organization, Search and Meta Data For Image Files

daveh0

daveh0

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 16, 2018
25
1
USA
A little background: I am a designer (mostly/sometimes). I've been doing this for a while and thus have utilized several computers/drives over the years. I am in the process of transferring files to a new system right now and in moving some unused stuff to my cloud storage, I started looking through some other previously-archived drives/directories and had a few moments of "oh that's where that ended up - that might have come in handy for XXX". I'm talking about image files of every sort... stock photos, sketches, mockups, web interfaces, icons, etc, etc... of various image file formats, including the editable ones like .ai and .psd. it seems that back in my younger years, I was not quite as organized as I like to think I am today so there is stuff EVERYWHERE.

What I would love would be to have a tool that can go through and index all of the various image files in all these archives (let's just say for the sake of keeping it simple, that they are all scattered about 1 gigantic external SSD accessible directly from the workstation on which this tool would be running), use AI to to figure out what kind of image it is (illustration, photograph, UI, etc) and add some other meta info like a description, keywords/tags that then allows the files to be found via a search within this tool.

I've seen a few things out there that kind of come close but nothing that hits the nail right on the head for my level of clutter and lack or organization, or even good file names for that matter. Being able to include PSDs and AIs (and EPSs, PDFs and maybe even some OBJs and/or BLENDs) AND being able to auto-assign at least some keywords are pretty important.

Obviously, the free-er the better, but a tool of this magnitude would surely be worth paying for a license for me.

Any suggestions for something that comes close?

EDIT​

I just came across Eagle, which looks like it would do the trick, assuming its AI capabilities are up to snuff. Any users here that can speak to that specifically?
 
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Take a look at PicArrange. It does not meet your ambitious goal of automation, but it does address some of your wants. It can sort large image libraries by similarity in content, color, etc, allows for tagging with keywords (albeit manually only, I believe). You can provide text descriptors such as “dog” or “two people standing” and it does an amazing job of finding such images. You can also provide a sample image, and PA will look for matches or similar images. All off-line on your local disk with large libraries (I have it currently applied to a set of some 200K images and 8K videos). As I say though, it only does some of the work, and you would have to do the rest for the level of organization you’re talking about.

I’ll be interested in other apps/approaches to this problem that others suggest.
 
Thanks for the reco. I'll definitely look into this.

You can provide text descriptors such as “dog” or “two people standing” and it does an amazing job of finding such images.
Click to expand...

By this do you mean that if somewhere in my massive archive I have a few images fitting that description, I can search those terms and it will find them without me finding them first and giving them some meta data that alludes to those terms? Mind you, these files could be named something as random as "kitchen sink.psd" (even though they're of two people standing) and on that note, does it work with editable formats such as .psd and .ai?
 
Yes, PA will find images of dogs when you enter the text “dog”. It sorts them by some internal measure of likelihood (calculated during the initial read-in “analysis” which takes the most time) and displays them all. The first ones are most likely to be a “dog”, and that becomes less likely as you move through displayed images. If the text “dog” is in the filename, I think it includes them also, but there are easier ways to search for explicit text (e.g. Find Any File is very good). I don’t think PA can automate metadata to match the content results; I believe that is left to you, e.g you can manually apply keywords from a list to images.

I think it handles .psd format but don’t know about .ai. I think it also handles .pdf.

Set up a sample folder of your stuff, and give it a try! That way you’ll find out if it can do what you want, or at least help.
 
This is pretty impressive, especially for FREE. Unfortunately the text search isn't available on Intel Macs. Kind of a deal-breaker for me. Definitely keep installed for a bit to continue playing with though.

If anyone else happens to have any first hand knowledge of Eagle or another recommendation, my search continues.
 
Spotlight is pretty good at indexing images and you can search with Finder. Content index includes not just file system and photo metadata (e.g. EXIF), but also what is in an image (e.g. "dogs"). Explore Spotlight (particularly searching using Finder) and only look for 3rd party software when you identify deficiencies.
 
I added the "photo organizer" tag to the set of tags on your thread.

In the past, I've added that tag to threads in the Photography forum that ask abour or discuss photo organizer apps. You can click that tag at the top of this thread to show the other threads with that tag.

The one-word tag "organizer" may also be a useful search.

Another term for these apps is "DAM" or "Digital Asset Manager", and "dam" does have some tagged threads.

It might also be worth searching the Photography forum for keywords "organizer" or "dam", with or without the "Search titles only" checkbox.
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