JPhotoTagger Editor's Review

Manage your photo collection with this handy Windows utility.

With the Holiday Season upon us, its important to have the right digital photo utilities in your tool box. You're going to want to find your stuff and get it together quickly so that you can share them with family and friends. This is why I really like tools like JPhotoTagger. It’s a digital photo utility for Windows and it can help you keep track of all of your digital photos.

JPhotoTagger is a platform independent Photo Manager, that has a native installer for Windows. You can use it to manage and find your photos quickly through the application of keywords, descriptions and other tags. It uses autocomplete to help speed up adding or editing tags, making it easy to apply them, and then eventually, search for them. All tags are written into XMP sidecar files and JPhotoTagger's database. Your photos aren't modified.

One of JPhotoTagger's best features is its ability to work with other applications like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. JPhotoTagger automatically reads tags from new and changed sidecar files and updates it's own database. You can tag your photos with Lightroom and JPhotoTagger, even on different operating systems, and JPhotoTagger can work with and use those tags. The app runs on any system where Java is installed.

App Pro’s: Free, works well with other apps, like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

App Con’s: help files are available only in German, needs Java to run 

Conclusion: Depending on how you have your photos organized, using utilities like JPhotoTagger can be a huge help. If your photo library is large, like mine, having some way to quickly organize and add metadata to it that will help you find what you're looking for so you can add photos to the right folders; or to find what you want to share with friends and family can be important.

The biggest problem that I see with JPhotoTagger is that it uses and needs Java to run. Aside from the security issues, which are numerous and enough to make you not want to install it on your machine, getting Java is problematic enough, in that there are a number of different suspicious apps that really want to install when you try to go and find the install file for your platform at Java.com.