Tagging on a computer: not there yet?

I have been into tagging for a while now. No need to explain the motivation, it is just a great way to have your pictures organized and it makes retrieval very easy. Like a lot of people i got introduced to mass tagging with Flickr but i quickly moved earlier in the work flow and decided to tag my pictures on my computer.
Indeed you can then tag every single picture you have, including the old ones or those you just don't put online, and in the end the tags will stay with the pictures when you upload them on any decent picture tagging website.
One problem remains though: there are not many tools that allow you to tag properly and easily, and that will use the IPTC standard (not the best, but it has the merit of existing).
I am a PC user so i really have two choices: Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Elements. iPhoto will be covered as well as it improved in its latest version.

• I began by using Picasa because it is free and so much faster to use. However tagging on Picasa is a disaster if you want to do it seriously (I am not talking about the labels here but the actual tags that get written within the picture file). There are no convenient shortcuts and you need to do too many clicks to tag a single picture... The feature is just not well designed.

• Photoshop Elements offered a much better interface thanks to drag and drop and the possibility to create categories and sub categories. However with an increasing library of tags the drag and drop becomes a little bit combersome and time consuming. Making it “check box style” would be a better way of going: you basically click on a picture to select it and then click on all the tags you want to attach to it, and that’s it. It would be much more time-effective (but not as fancy looking). And this program is just sooo slow in comparison with Picasa. As a user i have yet to understand why.

• As for iPhoto, i didn't use the latest version but a very good description is given on all forces and the double functionnality given to the tags is strange. One way you filter, the other you tag. It is not very user friendly and is defnitely bound to introduce some confusion. (We ran into similar issues when deciding how to allow people to interact with tags on pikeo, and keeping a consistant behavior ended up being the best solution).

In the end it is easier today to tag and batch tag pictures using online tools than desktop applications. Aren't these supposed to be the superior ones as far as rich interface is concerned? When will Google, Adobe and Apple really invest time in this and show faith in tagging? You can do better...

Tags:desktop tagging photo pikeo picasa photoshop iphoto web2.0