[rapter_F22]

Ok I'm just currious if there is a way to attach meta tags to a picture. I am creating a gallery and i need to be able to search the gallery some how with a few key words on each of the pictures. The gallery consists of around 2,000 pictures i believe and an efficient way of navigating it is needed. any help or suggestions?

Rapter

[Deathknight]

Hrm don't think you can add meta tags to them. I would suggest a database if you need to do any kind of searching.

[rapter_F22]

Is it possable to make a data base in access that is able to be searched from the web. the gallery is for a web page that is to be able to be accessed by the public

[Deathknight]

Oh definatly, the question is how comfortable are you with writing the code for it?

[JigPu]

Most image formats AFAIK contain data about the size of the image, and include markers to indicate the end of image data. This means it may be possible to simply insert comment/meta data at the end of image files and use those for searching. However, I wouldn't doubt that some file types or viewers may say that images modified in such a way are either corrupt or not an image at all. A few image formats specifically allow embeded comments, so it may be possible to leagaly put in comment/meta data into images for searching. Below are some pages on different image types.


This page shows how JPEGs are put together, and show that a specific marker (preceded by 0xFF) notifies the viewer of the end of image data. So you should be able to stick comments at the end, or use the built in commenting function I've heard they have (looks like an APP field used for that purpose).

This page has specifications on the GIF89a format, and talks about embedding comments. It also links to this page going very in depth to the specification and covers how comments are placed. Once again, a 'trailer' finishes the GIF, so it may be possible to append comment data at the end if you don't want to follow spec.

PNG I've heard of quite a few cases of people just appending data to the end that is ignored by viewers, so you should be able to stick comments there with no problem.

I haven't heard of anybody adding comments to BMP, however the specification shows that height and width are stored in the file, so it may be possible to tack on stuff at the end without problems, but it might be picky.


So it should be possible to write a program to both write comments to common image formats, as well as search through files for comment data. However, it's probably not going to be easy to write if you want to have the program follow the image's spec and wite comments correctly....

JigPu