I have been looking for software that could do this for me, and though finding software is easy, finding open source or free software was proving a bit more difficult. Of course, Adobe Lightroom is on top of this game, but I am not paying hundreds of dollars…rephrase: I cannot pay hundreds of dollars, even though it would be spectacularly convenient. Plus, I am a Linux guy, but before you tune out, the solution I found works in Windows and Mac as well.

I had been using Picasa 2 (a piece of software put out by Google to organize and simple edit your photos on your computer) for quite some time, but not all that much. Recently, I downloaded Picasa 3, and it is a whole different animal. The biggest change made is that Picasa can now add keyword data to your photos.

The big trick I was really wondering about, though, was if they were using some Picasa-only kind of method to tag or if they were using one of the two more standard formats for storing photo metadata: XMP (Adobe) or IPTC. I searched all over on the web and could not find any answers from Picasa or others (including some not-so-sure comments on Flickr). Then, on accident, I was looking through my photo metadata in Picasa 3, and it said “IPTC Keywords:”. Yea!

So, it looks like Google’s Picasa 3 software is indeed storing those keywords as IPTC, which is pretty standard. Now, once you keyword those photos, you will have to export the photos before the keywords are actually attached to the photo, which is a little awkward, but none the less, it works.

To view your photos’ metadata in Picasa, either press Alt+Enter or in the menu follow Picture > Properties. I would highly suggest Picasa 3 to anyone. It is excellent for organizing your photos and it does 95% of the editing that 95% of the people out there do on a daily basis, and does it fast. If I shot JPG only, I would use it almost exclusively simply because it saves so much time…plus, it has one of the best black and white conversions I have used (filtered black & white).

On a very different note, I was told recently by the developer of RAWstudio that RAWstudio hopes to add keywording soon. If they did that, I would practically live in RAWstudio, which is fine by me. RAW-what? RAWstudio (in my opinion) is the best RAW conversion workflow software out there for open source, available for Linux and Mac. I still use Picasa just to view photos, but if I had keywording there, all the “work” would then be in RAWstudio.