How it works

Technically, picurl is an offline photo digest aggregator combined with a metadata translator and storage independent tagging functions. Practically, picurl might be the photo management tool you have been looking for years. But let's see how it works in reality:

Step 1: Define your photo stores

First, you define photo stores in picurl, telling the program where you saved your photos. A photo store can be any device/media or service that saves/hosts your photos. To be more precise, picurl currently supports hard disks, removeable devices and media (USB-stick, mobile hard drives, CD-Rs and DVDs), HTTP and FTP servers plus the photosharing services Flickr and Picasa as stores for your photos.

Step 2: Super-Fast-Indexing

After entering one little shell command, picurl indexes your photo stores. during this process, picurl looks for photos on your stores and saves a miniature version (thumbnail) of each photo to your user directory. picurl only requests a tiny fraction of the actual image data for generating thumbnails, so indexing rather fast in most cases.

Step 3: Metadata translation (done automatically)

This step makes picurl unique: picurl doesn't just write the thumbnail to disk, it also includes the image metadata from the original image. If you index photos from a photosharing service like Flickr, all tags and other flickr metadata are exported to the thumbnail too.

Step 4: Enjoy 1000 possibilities

Now you have a complete, yet minimum-sized offline version of your distributed photo collection... and 1000 possibilies:

  1. Browse your collection in Windows Explorer or IrfanView and right-click'n download the photos you want.
  2. Inspect the contents of ALL your photo stores at a glace with picurl's powerful HTML Interface - you don't need to insert your photo DVDs or connect to the internet for that.
  3. Run powerful, SQL-like Queries on your photo collection to find all images you took on your exciting Barcelona trip with your OLYMPUS 740Z cam.
  4. Send your friend Brian a best-of collection of his portraits within a small zip file - and let him decide what he wants to download.

Questions?

What is Metadata?

This term is generally used for data that describes other data. Usually, metadata classifies the base data in a concise way and can be accessed much faster. A good example is the short back-cover summary of a book - you can read the contents at a glance. So you find interesting books much faster than by browsing them.

Also your digital photos contain metadata, provided by your camera (e.g. the width and height of the photo, which camera settings were used during the shooting) and/or by you (describing the photo with keywords, captions and credits). The purpose is the same: a metadata-capable program just needs to read a few bytes from the photo file and can e.g. tell you about the resolution of the picture or if it was shot at night. Of course you can also get this information by opening the photo in an image editor, but with a lot of photos this process becomes rather ineffective.

What are EXIF and IPTC?

All technical metadata provided by your camera is saved under the EXIF standard, while your captions/keywords and credits are stored using the IPTC-NAA standard.

Both standards allow arbitrary programs or cameras to read and write metadata from/to your images. EXIF and IPTC have been around since decades, so hundreds if not thousands of image editing tools, photo management applications or content management systems support them. The maybe best-known are Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, IrfanView, Apple iPhoto, Corel Photo Paint,...

But Flickr, Picasa, phpGallery ... all seem to understand EXIF and IPTC tags. So where is the problem?

Photosharing platforms and Online Photo galleries can only IMPORT EXIF AND IPTC data, but then store keywords, captions and other metadata in their own, proprietary databases. We don't know of any service that allows you to EXPORT a photo with all complete metadata set (meaning the original metadata of the photo plus the information you added in the service, e.g. a new geotag).

And what about all those nice APIs from photosharing services?

Many photosharing services offer APIs (Application Programming Interface), that allow third-party programs/scripts to interact with the service. These APIs are commonly used to automate photo management tasks (e.g. uploading photos, getting/editing metadata of photos). picurl itself makes use of APIs.

However, those APIs are no replacement for the established metadata standards EXIF, IPTC and XMP. While these standards have been around since decades, APIs sometimes change within months - resulting in malfunctioning 3rd party tools.

So there are hardly any applications that support managing pictures from photosharing services. And the few that are existing, only support either Flickr or Picasa.

Here is where picurl comes into play: it translates the proprietary metadata to standard EXIF and IPTC tags, so that nearly any photo management software understands it.