Picture formats/organizing/notes?

[freakazoid]

Since I've been taking a lot of pictures I've got to wondering what the best way to label the information about them is. Only way I know how is to either give it an incredibly long name or to create a text file or spreadsheet giving all the information about them. I'm wondering if there is a format that will actually store that information in it that you can enter. I have a music player program called MediaMonkey, that allows me to embed a bunch of information; track info, artist, CD, disk#, various album arts like front back etc, extra info, genre, etc. I'm wondering if there is anything like that for pictures or if a specific picture format would be needed. That way when I view the picture I can see other information that i feel is important.

PS, I highly recommend MediaMonkey if you have a large music collection. I love it enough that I actually paid for it. You can even have it auto tag with information from the web. I installed a plug-in for it that pulls information from a website that I love called Discogs that has user entered info on music where you can also buy music.

[zahc]

Picasa used to be good but I think Google killed it.

Honestly there are tons of such programs out there that create their own database in the background. I have forgot them all. I use whatever is the default for my Linux distribution. The problem is there is no standard for the database format so in 20 years you will be back to your raw images. I don't know if this is a solved problem in that sense. Archival and retrieval of digital media is kind of a big problem still.

[RoadKingLarry]

Best I've ound for editing, storing and indexing is Adobe Lightroom. 99% of any editing I do is done in Lightroom.
Very flexible in how you archive your work.
I also only shoot RAW format. Any editing done in Lightroom is nondestructive to the original file. Edits are save as an overlay and stored with the original image file. Output from Lightroom can be exported in about any standard format, JPEG, Bitmap, GIF...
It isn't free but works, there are several free options that are supposed to do the same thing but I have no experience with them

[cordex]

EXIF data can store title, subject, tags, comments, etc.  You can view and edit that data for individual files in Windows natively, but I'm sure there are EXIF database applications out there.

[HeroHog]

In Winders, right-click the file, click the "Details" tab then select "Comments" and edit away. Save when done.

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