Organizing your texture library

hyrumark

Next rainy day, I'm going to organize my texture collection. Right now they are just sitting in vaguely named folders, and I need something better.

I'm looking for an app that will let me tag my photos with keywords, then let me perform a fast search on these keywords, and display the results in a nice thumnail view. I'm sure there a dozen good apps that will do this, but I'm looking for a real world recommendation on which one is nice and fast even with a huge library , and has a fast browser with a nice thumbnail display.

Any suggestions?

Snowfly

Xnview lets you do this to some extent, but it isn't tailor made for the task.

I was checking out a freeware called Photomesa a while back. Maybe that's what you're looking for- http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa/

LoTekK

Interestingly enough, Vista has support for image tags built into the OS. The default browser view (with details pane on the bottom) allows you to add tags to each image, and you can search by those tags. It's not fantastic, but it's a functional start.

edit:
Photomesa looks pretty nifty

ivars

This can be done with irfanview (it's freeware)
You´ll need the IPTC plugin (also free from the irfanview website)

http://www.irfanview.com/

edit: Don't know about the speed, though. Never used it that way.

hawken

maybe way off the mark here but iPhoto on the mac supports photo tagging.

Joshua Stubbles

I just put brick textures in a brick folder...metal textures in a metal texture. Not hard, people! :P

hyrumark

I love Irfanview as a picture viewer, but it's thumbnail browser and search are way too slow.

But a big thanks for the Vista suggestion! Holy crap who knew that Vista could get something so right! As long as the directory is marked as indexed, the tags I added are dipslayed INSTANTLY in real time, usually only after typing a few letters in the search box. Plus Vista can display those oversize thumbnails, and fast too. Great job Microsoft!

MoP

Yeah, Vista's indexed desktop search is actually pretty damn good.

Toast

The trouble with Vista...even though it's the 21st century and 2008. They still don't have thumbnail support for TGA! :poly127:

Not to mention exotic formats like .iff