Digital Light & Color

I would find it useful if I could pick images of certain size in Browse. I don't recall exactly, but I think that PWP3.5 had some such ability?

As a side note: I'd like to organize my image library a little better. There are freeware Lightroom-like image managers out there, but as far as I know they use propriatory databases to store information - which to me means that if I decide to change application, the work spent on organizing them is lost. There is also portability issue.

I would like the data to be kept in EXIF/IPTC/XMP only

PWP allows to comment on images - a combination of EXIF, IPTC, and JPG comment, I think, but i never now which field is which. For Cannon DPP, all the recipes are held in Maker's Data, which is great, but only good for Canon and the descriptions are lacking. Neither has a search facility.

ExifTool is fantastic and flexible, but no search.

FastStone is great all around, but only allows JPG comments.

Did anyone encountered a simple, portable application that would allow me to triage/tag/keyword images, write whatever I've typed to metadata (perhaps to an external DB as well to speed things up when searching, but not only to external DB), and allow me to find images across library with some grace?

Cheers!

Have you looked at IMatch from photools.com? It will easily handle your sorting and metadata needs, but I'm not sure about the portability. How do you see it being used in that sense?

Try Zoner 15. After the trial you will be use their free version. Again, I don't know about portability.

Many thanks - I'm reviewing options and will report when successful.

I have this penchant for portability and small sizes - good software don't have to be bloated - PWP is a prime example of it.

In my case portability means that the programme should ideally work on different computers without complex installation/administrative rights, and also the library metadata should, ideally, be movable from HD to HD (for instance by sticking to within-file metadata or movable sidecar files such as PWP own workflow sidecar file system.

I don't really need anything fancy, and PWP, as it is, is really close to what's needed: triage, then sorting and describing, then finding.

Triage can be done with Play in the workflow window easily enough already - the problem is preserving the ratings in e.g. IPTC/EXIF (and to a lesser degree 1:1 quick look - I do take a lot of unsharp images - even 1:1 of an embedded 1/4 JPG in RAW would be useful for that purpose, I think). Comments/keywords can be entered in PWP - what's confusing is that I'm not sure which field is which (e.g. IPTC or EXIF set, and the names are not standard), there are 3 competing places that see metadata (keywords, file info and properties), and there is no facility to allow to enter default text such as copyright and paste it to a bunch of images.

And the search.... that would be awesome!

BTW am I dreaming by saying that 3.5 had some EXIF search facility that was lost in later PWP versions?

Cheers!

This may be of interest:
http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml