Storing pictures has always been a challenge to shutterbugs, a challenge that hasn't been rectified by the arrival of digital photography. Shoe boxes stuffed with snapshots have been replaced by hard drives crammed with photo files. While solutions to the shoe box problem may be elusive, that's not the case with organizing photo files on a hard drive. One such solution is FotoTagger.


The free software lets you annotate the subjects in a photo. The annotations appear as boxes on the image with arrows pointing to the subject. They're placed on an overlay so they can be displayed or hidden with a mouse click. In addition to the annotations, you can add captions to a photo, too. Searches can be performed based on the annotations and captions tagged to your images.

Another nice feature: pics can be uploaded with their annotations to Netposts like Blogger, LiveJournal and Flickr.

Like many photo organizing programs, a great amount of sweat equity is involved pouring through images on your hard drive and typing in captions and annotations. FotoTagger's authors, though, make an interesting point about the benefits of investing time cataloguing pics with their application.

"FotoTagger is much more than a software tool," they write. "This is another approach to how you look at pictures. Shift your focus, look around the main scene and you will explore details that are not less interesting than what is happening in the center of the image."