Topic: What's a good (and preferably free) image categorizer for Windows XP?

[JonLeung]

Let's say I have a bunch of images that I want to assign multiple categorical keywords on, and also be able to search for those images using one or more keywords.  I'm using XP on the computer in question (nope, not Vista or 7).

Like for these maps for example...If I used such a program, I could label all the maps of Super Mario games with a "Super Mario" tag, and all the maps of Super NES games with a "Super NES" tag, and then if I later searched for both, I'd get Super Mario World maps.  I'd like to be able to view these images within that program, not just locate/filter them.

Anyone know of such a program?

You know, it sounds like an incredibly basic thing, but I can't seem to find an image viewing and sorting program that can do this, specifically for Windows XP.  I know later versions of Windows allow you to assign keywords to images, but even that feels limited, and last I checked they don't allow that for all image file types.  You can put tons of information about a JPEG in itself, but you get very few options for PNGs.

I don't mind if someone suggests a program that stores the keywords in a separate database rather than as metadata in the images themselves.  I might prefer it that way, unless it can somehow add it to the metadata without changing the images' "Date Modified" date.

I love CompuPic Pro, outdated as it is, and it can put copies of images (within the database and linked, not actual file copies) into categories (though only single ones), but CompuPic Pro's thumbnail and database file (def.phd) seems to be very, very prone to corruption just from regular use.  When this happens I simply delete the file, but then it has to create thumbnails again (no big deal) but any categories I made are gone too (>_<).

[Maxim]

Picasa. It's very fast, supports tags in the way you'd expect, supports your directory structure as it already exists. It doesn't modify the files themselves, though. It's very photo-oriented, but works for all images (it supports PNG, GIF etc).

[JonLeung]

Holy schmokes, nice!  I'm sure I've heard of it before but didn't think it was anything special, but this looks like it could be a very handy and versatile tool!  Thanks for sharing, Maxim!   

For my non-map-related purposes, the face-recognition thing is really neat, too.  Cool stuff.

[TerraEsperZ]

I wasn't interested in this at first since I was mainly thinking about game mapping, but it would be nice to have an easy way to categorize all the various images I've collected over the years. It certainly would be better to use external tags than to end up with filenames that are unnecessarily long and useless. I'll give this Picasa a try!

[JonLeung]

Funny time for us to get into this...a quick search on Google suggests it may be renamed to "Google Photos" very soon.  Does Google+ (the so-called Facebook killer that I keep getting invites for) have similar functions for photos?

I'm having too much fun with the face recognition.  It was scanning my main photos folder all last night and is still only about halfway done.  It's pretty good at guessing whose faces it's looking at after you've named those people, but it does seem to have trouble with some tilted heads or if people are closing their eyes.

Come to think of it, this might be really good for some of my more...private..image folders.

It's kind of crazy how good image recognition has gotten in the past few years, even things like tineye.com (which I also learned about here) blow me away.  No doubt there are captcha cheating programs in the works, if image recognition isn't already smart enough...