Photo Organizer with Media Center plugin

[lewinr]

Hi All,

Can anybody give me advice on a good photo organizer that has a plugin for Windows 7 Media Center for doing slide shows using the photos on my disk?

I used PhotoShop Elements 6 in the past, which had exactly what I needed. But now I have problems with it crashing and I want to upgrade. As far as I can tell, the latest version of Elements does not have the plugin for Media Center (or am I wrong?).

I also found a plugin for Picasa from 2008 but as I see it works only with public galleries on the internet.

Does anybody know another solution?

Thanks, Ron

[gpatlanta]

I just use the defa.t Media Center photo viewer. It works fine for me, but admittedly I don't use it often. Out of curiosity, what kind of functionality are you looking for that the default MC doesn't do for you?

[lewinr]

We have about 6000 photos tagged with various keywords and divided into albums and events

So I want to be able to view only a specific set of photos which might be from some specific album/event or with a specific keyword.

I actually have not played much with the standard WMC photo viewer. Does it support viewing photos based on metadata tags? Also, does it respect the meta-data tag for orientation (landscape/portrait) or it requires the files themselves to be in the respective orientation?

Thanks for your help,
Ron

[gcoupe]

Ron,

All my photos have IPTC Core metadata embedded in them. The good news is that WMC recognises, and reads in, the IPTC Core Keywords (Tags). WMC will then display a "tags" menu item in the top level menu of the Picture library. As far as I'm aware, it also respects the orientation metadata (i.e. my photos are always displayed in the correct orientation, and they contain the Exif orientation metadata).

The bad news is that it is slooowww. Trying to navigate the tag hierarchy (I use hierarchical tags with up to nine levels of depth) is unbelievably slow, and is, to all intents and purposes, useless. Windows Live Photo Gallery has no such performance problems - I sometimes wish that different groups within Microsoft would share what works rather then reinvent the wheel all the time.

If you have a flat list of tags, perhaps the performance will be improved.

[lewinr]

Geoff, thanks for your advice. I've been playing with it and it looks like I can indeed use the standard functionality... except for one problem.

WMC sees only the tags which existed in the files when I added them to the library.

So after adding the directory with the photos to the library, I see all tags and can filter, etc on them.

But then I opened the photos in Elements, changed the tags, and wrote the new tags to the files. (And I confirmed from Windows Explorer that the new tags are contained in the file properties.

And when I open Pictures tiles in WMC, I dont see any of the new tags.

Any idea how I can see the new tags? Is there some procedure in WMC to tell it to re-read the tags? (I tried rebooting, etc, but so far I did not try to remove and add the library. I just dont want to have to do that every time I change some tags...)

Thanks
Ron

[gcoupe]

Sorry Ron, I don't know where WMC holds the Tag list. If someone knows, perhaps they can tell us. I suspect that if the Tag list is deleted, WMC will re-create it and give you the updated tags.