In Search Of App Capable Of Advanced Indexing, Organization, Search and Meta Data For Image Files

[daveh0]

A little background: I am a designer (mostly/sometimes). I've been doing this for a while and thus have utilized several computers/drives over the years. I am in the process of transferring files to a new system right now and in moving some unused stuff to my cloud storage, I started looking through some other previously-archived drives/directories and had a few moments of "oh that's where that ended up - that might have come in handy for XXX". I'm talking about image files of every sort... stock photos, sketches, mockups, web interfaces, icons, etc, etc... of various image file formats, including the editable ones like .ai and .psd. it seems that back in my younger years, I was not quite as organized as I like to think I am today so there is stuff EVERYWHERE.

What I would love would be to have a tool that can go through and index all of the various image files in all these archives (let's just say for the sake of keeping it simple, that they are all scattered about 1 gigantic external SSD accessible directly from the workstation on which this tool would be running), use AI to to figure out what kind of image it is (illustration, photograph, UI, etc) and add some other meta info like a description, keywords/tags that then allows the files to be found via a search within this tool.

I've seen a few things out there that kind of come close but nothing that hits the nail right on the head for my level of clutter and lack or organization, or even good file names for that matter. Being able to include PSDs and AIs (and EPSs, PDFs and maybe even some OBJs and/or BLENDs) AND being able to auto-assign at least some keywords are pretty important.

Obviously, the free-er the better, but a tool of this magnitude would surely be worth paying for a license for me.

Any suggestions for something that comes close?

EDIT​

I just came across Eagle, which looks like it would do the trick, assuming its AI capabilities are up to snuff. Any users here that can speak to that specifically?

 

[zqbobs]

Take a look at PicArrange. It does not meet your ambitious goal of automation, but it does address some of your wants. It can sort large image libraries by similarity in content, color, etc, allows for tagging with keywords (albeit manually only, I believe). You can provide text descriptors such as “dog” or “two people standing” and it does an amazing job of finding such images. You can also provide a sample image, and PA will look for matches or similar images. All off-line on your local disk with large libraries (I have it currently applied to a set of some 200K images and 8K videos). As I say though, it only does some of the work, and you would have to do the rest for the level of organization you’re talking about.

I’ll be interested in other apps/approaches to this problem that others suggest.

 

[daveh0]

Thanks for the reco. I'll definitely look into this.

You can provide text descriptors such as “dog” or “two people standing” and it does an amazing job of finding such images.

By this do you mean that if somewhere in my massive archive I have a few images fitting that description, I can search those terms and it will find them without me finding them first and giving them some meta data that alludes to those terms? Mind you, these files could be named something as random as "kitchen sink.psd" (even though they're of two people standing) and on that note, does it work with editable formats such as .psd and .ai?