How to easily add Tags and Keywords in Photographs

Hi Folks!

I am these days trying to organize my data, and am adding tags, keywords and other relevant details in every image so that they can be easily sorted out. I am adding all these details using PS CS 3, is there any other software or tool that can do that in a much easier manner as adding details in CS 3 seems to be quite a boring and lengthy process.

If you've got CS3 then you should also have Bridge...yes?

PHOTOMECHANIC - www.camerabits.com...the BEST by FAR tagging software out there. It's the industry standard, honestly don't know one photographer without it that does any type of tagging and is pretty much a necessity if anyone wants to submit to an agency of any sorts. Way back used to tag in PS and going to PM cut the time down big, what used to take an hour takes 5 mins.

are there any cheap/free plugins for lightroom that can do the job?

I found Photomechanic to be good, LR is also nice but Photo mechanic is just too good.

maxloxton wrote in post #9263986
I found Photomechanic to be good, LR is also nice but Photo mechanic is just too good.

Yup....and honestly, it's a requirement now of almost all agencies to have PM because LR doesn't have everything that PM does.

Keywording and tagging are never fun. It's repetitive detail work that I doubt anyone really enjoys very much.

I primarily use Lightroom2 (actually 2.6RC now, and have toyed with LR3 beta a bit).

With Lightroom you can add a lot of generally descriptive things when importing the images. You can even automate a lot of this if you wish. Then go in and add more on a per image basis as you edit... Or in small or large batches as you see fit. It's very easy, but I haven't used Photo Mechanic so can't really compare.

CS3/Bridge was just way too slow whenever there was a high volume of stuff to be done. I used to use it but have pretty much switched to LR2 for all the preliminary editing, up through the proofing out to customers. This has cut my editing time by about 2/3 (what took three full days now takes one).

After the customer has made their choices, depending upon usage, the export from Lightroom might be usable... Or if necessary the final, selected images are re-processed individually through CS4 or Canon DPP.

Keywording can be added at any point along the way, but I find LR to be the easiest and quickest place to do it.

amfoto1 wrote in post #9265704
With Lightroom you can add a lot of generally descriptive things when importing the images. You can even automate a lot of this if you wish. Then go in and add more on a per image basis as you edit... Or in small or large batches as you see fit. It's very easy, but I haven't used Photo Mechanic so can't really compare.

PM is the same - pretty much for my tagging there's a basic tag I load with a lot of variables so you don't need to change much after the basic info which fills in itself in other areas of the tag. Tagging is quick and easy. Problem with it vs. LR is that LR is missing info agencies need - at least when people hand in photos I've noticed certain things missing so either it doesn't have those areas or the people are just not finding them.

As Mike mentioned above, PM hands down for tagging, key wording, color coding. I have tried LR2 but I found it takes about 2-3 min longer for ingest then PM and on dead line this is not good, But the one tool that PM offers that I have not found in LR or Aperture is the capability to create and use code replacement (Code Replacement is a feature which speeds up captioning of often-used terms or names like those used in sports photography, but can be used as a method of shorthand for any type of photography.)
PM offers a 30 day trial give a try

Another vote for Photo Mechanic! Awesome program.