A Photographer’s Challenge: storing photos

by job on September 14, 2010

Every photographer faces different challenges.

From issues on resources to concerns on storage, photographers face challenges that ought to have solutions. I know some photographers who’d rather store all photos to a CD especially if it’s for a certain client. For hobbyists, storing photos is more of a challenge. This is because most of them would really prefer to keep it. So far, the best way to keep it without having to worry about running out of computer memory is storing it online.

Multiply, a social networking and file-sharing website, became very popular with its photo storage feature. After a while, it became the hub for aspiring photographers to showcase their portfolios. The good thing about Multiply is that users have the option to highlight favorite albums with photos in it. The bad thing about the site though is that it doesn’t upload photos as it is. The resolution changes according to the available specs the site offers. Most professional photographers are pushed to upgrade to a premium paid account to upload photos in original sizes.

With Facebook being the newest online social hub for almost everyone in the planet, storing photos has also become another craze. However, it’s not as convenient as it sounds. The website has had bug issues in the past when it comes to uploading photos. Some people just can’t bear with it. Not only that, Facebook also takes too long a time to have a bunch of photos uploaded. Suffice to say that it is not essentially a photo storage website. It’s just a venue to interact about certain photos whenever people are tagged.

Lately, an innovative tool has come out. As a hobbyist myself, I got curios as to what Annotate Expert could offer. And amazingly the tool has unconventional features that would take every photographer’s attention. Although it’s not the ultimate solution to a photographer’s challenge in terms of photo storage, it spices up the idea of storing photos in a major way.

The great thing about Annotate Expert is that it allows people to store their photos with necessary and additional information inside the photos themselves. Take these photos as examples.

Here’s a photo that has been taken few weeks ago. Still very fresh. What’s unique about Annotate Expert is that it allows you to add comments and captions in the different parts of the photo itself. The tool has features that automatically connects the comments to the portion of the photo. The photo below is an annotated image. When viewing this photo from my computer, it appears without comments or distortions at all. But to view the comments years from now, I can open it using Annotate Expert as my storage tool while being able to read captions that I might forget by that time.

(annotated version)

(original photo w/ annotations only viewable using the tool)


Hobbyists like me who take photos every now and then would find Annotate Expert very interesting and useful. Imagine three years from now, if I store 500 photos every year then I’d need my brain to be very keen of the stories and details behind every photo. By then I’d have 1,500 photos and wouldn’t have the luxury of memory to remember some facts about certain photos. Annotating it today would free me up from the burden of trying to remember in years to come.

In the case of photo storage, online options may spare you from running out of memory but it cannot overtake the benefit of being able to store not just photos but details of an image to enhance the experience of looking back at it. As for me, Annotate Expert makes the idea storing up photos offline in my computer more worth it.

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Is a picture worth a thousand words?

by Annotator on July 30, 2010

Pictures are certainly worth of many words.

But what if you need words to explain what is in the picture?

You could describe it like “that thing at the top-left corner”, you could open simple photo editor like Microsoft Paint and draw shaky arrows & circles, or drop the image into Word and draw nicer geometric shapes with some text on a side.

However, there is a better way to attach notes to images as digital images can store much more data than just plain pixels. By using a professional image annotation software, it is possible to add text to the photographs while leaving the actual image intact. The textual notes, or better said the annotations, stay linked to the specific area of the photo (small rectangle or square) and are saved inside of the image. When such annotated picture gets opened in any image viewer, all that is seen is unchanged original photograph.

I can send (email/web upload) image to friends, colleagues or business partners. When the receiver opens the image inside the annotation software he/she can read the text notes, make changes and save them with no destruction done to the actual photograph. The software, however, provides also a visual annotation export which will generate a separate JPG image.

You can see this in the following examples.

Example 1.
Annotated JPG image with annotations stored inside. To see them you will need to open this image inside of the Photo Image Annotator (Annotate Expert).

invisible annotations

Instructions: If you haven’t already, you will need to download & install the Photo Image Annotator (Annotate Expert). Then click on the image above, right-click Save As image onto your computer, and open it (drag and drop) into the Photo Image Annotator.

Example 2.
Exported JPG image from the Photo Image Annotator (Annotate Expert).

exported annotations

Instructions: Click on the image above, then zoom-in and pan/scroll around to read the annotations.

As you can see, the Photo Image Annotator is a very handy and smart tool for creating, storing and exporting annotations.

There are many more capabilities of the Photo Image Annotation software and we’ll talk about more features later. So don’t forget to check out or subscribe your browser or Google Reader to RSS of this site.

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