Organizing Digital Photos

Our organization provides business assistance to NYC manufacturers. Over time, we have collected hundreds of digital photos from site visits and events. While we have maintained labeled folders for each group of pictures, I'm realizing that is not enough. We need to label the photos with the names of people in the images for future use in captions and the like.
What kinds of programs are folks using to organize their digital photos?
I'm looking for something that doesn't come off the camera's CD, as we have multiple people taking pictures and putting them on our server through different means - direct download from a card, email attachments, CD, etc.
Thank you,
Anne

You are really looking for a photo library for commercial photographers who have to track model releases and mechanical releases with their photo stock.

If you have some data base help you could start to build your own data base that wold list the path to the picture, subject, notes, releases, dates, picture technical info and most importantly key words. Then a search by key word would list the photos with the key word and you could select from there.


One trick the e-copy people do is to use the 254 character file name limit to include this data in the file name of the document. You could use that to include key information. "DSCN005 new big building sept 22-2007 kelly joe steve ribbon cutting.jpg" but this would get old really fast.

You could just include a word document with each picture file on the server with the same name as the picture. So DSCN005.jpg would have a corresponding word doc DSCN005.doc Then the Word document could be free from information about the picture. You could use goolge desktop to index the word documents and that becomes your search tool.

Dave

Ok, so is anyone using Photo Library Software? Do they like it? Hate it?

I tripped over MS Picture Manager on my computer. Anyone use this? If I set it up, how do I share it with the rest of my coworkers?

Thank you!