I scan both sides as separate images giving the files a common name, the obverse side having the suffix "-o". If taken from an historic album, the file names begin with the page number-relative position on page, e.g., 07-3. Between this prefix and the obverse suffix, I add a descriptive name if a person is identified. If a loose photo with no page-posn prefix, then the name is surname first. I import the images into Picasa and caption them extensively. Picasa has a google search tool that searches both file names and captions, allowing the names to be succinct with elaboration in the captions. Moreover, it has facial recognition tool which creates a virtual album of all the photos that an individual appears in regardless of the number of different paths to the files. And you can manually create any number of custom virtual albums combining and ordering any photos from any paths for a specific purpose. Thus the one image file can be used simultaneously for many different purposes. For collaboration, you can upload any photos, folders, and virtual albums to PicasaWeb. You can restrict access to invitees only or make any online albums public. Viewers will see your captions, identified faces, photo locations and can submit comments. I made one 19th century album public and eventually had great support from a discoverer who had resources to identify when each photographer was active and where. RootsMagic does not read the captions that Picasa writes into the image file's metadata nor does it write its own to the file. That's an enhancement I have asked for. Using some other tools, I have batch imported those captions into my RM database. Tom

Tom, I was wondering what tool you used to import the Picasa metadata? I use Digikam, more often would it work for that? Thanks, Kim On 10/24/2012 09:17 PM, Tom Holden wrote: > RootsMagic does not read the captions that Picasa writes into the image file's metadata nor does it write its own to the file. That's an enhancement I have asked for. Using some other tools, I have batch imported those captions into my RM database. > > Tom > >