Software: Playing Tag

If you’re like the average family historian, you probably have a lot of digital pictures and scanned heritage photos stored on your hard drive. This adds up to the computer equivalent of a shoebox full of unlabeled pictures-in other words, the mystery photos of the future.

Wish you could caption those pictures? Help is here in the form of FotoTagger <www.fototagger.com>, a tool that lets you label your digital image files. With this free downloadable software, you can add names, dates, historical facts, even the reason Aunt Ethel wore that hideous hat.

Using it is a snap (well, a mouse click): Once you’ve opened the program, select a photo from your hard drive using the File menu, then click on Tags to add labels. A small box appears on the left side of the screen; type your text there. (Tags can be as long as you like, but the total text entered in all an image’s tags can’t exceed 32K.) Then click the blue square in the corner of the box to draw a line attaching your tag to a part of the image. Repeat to add as many tags as your heart desires. Anytime you want to read your labels, just open the image in FotoTagger; to view the image label-free, select “hide tags” in the View menu.

You can use Foto Tagger to export your picture as an HTML file and e-mail it to relatives so they can view the details. (If they want to hide or add tags, they’ll need to download Foto Tagger for themselves.) FotoTagger also helps you post your pictures to the blogs on Blogger <blogger.com> and LiveJournal <livejournal.com>, and upload them to Flickr <flickr.com>. You’ll need Windows 2000 or newer and 128MB RAM to use FotoTagger — then you can put an end to chasing after elusive digital photo details.

From the May 2007 issue of Family Tree Magazine.