Ask HN: what do you use for image management?

[sraquo]

Hello HN,

I have hundreds of images that I downloaded from the web – pieces of inspiration (photographs, screenshots of whole websites, navigation elements or logos), hacks from thereifixedit.com, funny xkcd/dilbert/lolcats, pictures from airliners.net and whatever else.

My pain: how to organize all this. All mac apps including those that support tags are essentially folder-based, tags/keywords are used only for text search. I however need tag-based GUI, so that I can find all images of boeing 737s taking off in a couple clicks. Similarly, sometimes I want to see all navigation UIs I saved, other times – all 37signals stuff I saved. Folders fail here. It's also a problem because I could be saving much more images if I knew I could manage them well.

I will make a mac app for this purpose, that is essentially tag-based, but with a couple twists (if you're interested in seeing pre-release versions, drop me a line at nikita@chopperdefense.com)

So, question: Do you also save a lot of photos/images/screenshots from the web? How do you organize them? Do you upload them to flickr, or use some app (which one)? Does this solve your problem?

I just need to see whether anyone else has this problem. Please help me with this. Thank you.

[timrobinson]

I use Adobe Lightroom for this; it's an image management and photography workflow app and is organised around both folder and tags. That is, it organises images on disk in folders, but provides tools for tagging images and browsing by metadata. Version 3 has built-in support for Flickr uploads; previous versions had plugins for this.

I haven't used Apple Aperture, but I understand it's similar to Lightroom.

[sraquo → timrobinson]

Thanks! These are great apps esp. their workflow parts, but for me they don't work unfortunately. Aperture's somewhat better but it also doesn't have a GUI for finding images by keywords unless you create a smart album or something like that for each of your keywords, and even that is not what I want...