Review of Picajet FX 2.5 Photo Database Software
I have been taking pictures for many years and have found it increasingly difficult to find the pictures I wanted in the ever growing folder structure I stored them in. A couple of years ago I started looking for a photo database that would give me the capability of sorting my pictures into multiple subcategory sets and then query the subcategories against each other. For example: if I wanted to find all of the pictures I had taken of plants in the family Rosaceae in the state of California, I could query the category structure (Plants/Vascular Plants/Rosaceae) against (Places/USA/California). Almost every database I found was filled with useless crap and wouldn’t work like I wanted it to. There was only one database I found that appeared to do what I required and that was Picajet FX. I have been using Picajet FX for a couple years now and feel I should share my experiences with it to all the prospective buyers out there.
Basically, Picajet FX is exactly what I wanted, except that it doesn’t work like it is supposed to which renders it useless much of the time. The only reason I’m still using it is because I haven’t found anything better. The good part about Picajet FX is that the interface lets me use it like I would use Windows Explorer to create a folder structure and drag whatever I want over to the folder I want it in, except it is a category structure rather than a folder structure. I could take a single picture and put it under a bunch of different categories that I might want to query later. If I had a picture taken at Crater Lake National Park showing a landscape of the lake with Wizard Island and the plants Pulsatilla occidentalis and Pinus albicaulis, I could categorized it in the following ways: (Places/USA/Oregon/Crater Lake National Park), (Landscapes), (Landforms/Islands), (Landforms/Volcano), (Water/Lakes), (Plants/Vascular Plants/Ranunculaceae/Pulsatilla occidentalis), (Plants/Vascular Plants/Pinaceae/Pinus albicaulis), and probably a bunch of others. I could then query any of those categories and/or subcategories against any of the others and this picture would come up. For example if I wanted to see all of the landscape pictures I took in Oregon that have water in them, this picture would show up. Picajet FX has a bunch of other features, but none of them are really important compared to that one.
So, what is the problem with Picajet FX? The biggest problem is that the queries only work on simple category structures. If a category or subcategory has only a limited number of its own subcategories, it works fine. If you have lots of subcategories, you are screwed. It won’t work. The early example querying the category structure (Plants/Vascular Plants/Rosaceae) against (Places/USA/California) works because neither Rosaceae or California has very many subcategories. What if I want to see all of the pictures of vascular plants I have from Joshua Tree National Park? That is a query of (Plants/Vascular Plants) against (Places/USA/California/Joshua Tree National Park). Picajet FX’s result of this query is the following error: “You select too much criteria for query! Cannot display results.” I have too many subcategories under the Vascular Plants category. Picajet FX can’t handle anything beyond very basic category structures. This is a huge problem as I require complex category structures that is a very typical query that I would make. I’ve tried contact the Picajet FX’s programmers many times over the past couple year to get them to fix this problem, but they just don’t seem to understand that there is not much point in having a database that you can’t query.
There are several other problems with Picajet FX that are really annoying, but I can deal with them if they would fix the query function. One particularly obnoxious problem is that almost every time I use Picajet FX, it locks up for about 10-15 minutes at a time seemingly doing nothing. If you wait for it to do whatever it is doing, it will eventually start working again. This isn’t bad if you are working with it for hours, but if you want to use it for 20 minutes and it locks up for 15 minutes, it’s really problematic.
In conclusion, Picajet FX has a huge amount of potential, but fails miserably by not reaching that potential. If it could do what it claims it can do, it would be wonderful. Still, it’s the best thing I’ve found. If anyone else has found a good photo database that will function the way I want it to, let me know. Otherwise I guess I’m stuck with Picajet.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
isnt John supposed to be making a database thing for you? Whatever happened to that? John?
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 pm
That’s a database for my website which is totally different.
January 24th, 2008 at 5:26 am
I agree to 100%. Ibought Pcajet a year ago. At the moment i am also looking for something else. Perhaps the Version 3 would be better, but we are waiting for it since years and i dont belive it will ever be ready.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I am glad I didn’t purchase it before reading this account. I am not surprised that it freezes up, and that drives me nuts. I also need the photo database to be accessible by everyone throughout the network, so i think I am just going to organize the image files in Microsoft explorer on the shared drive and perhaps make a spreadsheet as an index or to search and then refer to the file and its location. What a pain, but what else is there? Thanks.
January 31st, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Of course, I’d say get a Mac, where you have iPhoto out-of-the-box, and you can buy Apple’s Aperture or Adobes Lightroom. But then you wouldn’t use such queries… it’d be more like using flickr or most web 2.0 stuff – keywords narrowing down the selection.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Can a Mac organize photos based on categories with infinite subcategories that can be queried against each other? If not, I don’t see any point in owning a Mac. I need excessive organization that is easily implemented. Random keywords just don’t cut it.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
But keywords are categories with infinite subcategories. Let’s say you’re using Lightroom and you tag a picture of a Joshua Tree with a set of tags: “plant ‘Joshua tree’ tree ‘Joshua Tree National Park’ California monocotyledonous ‘Yucca brevifolia’” and then let’s say you tag a picture of a giant sequoia with another set of tags: “plant ‘redwood’ ‘giant sequoia’ ‘Sequoia sempervirens’ California tree conifer”.
If you go to the find box in the Library module and do a search for California tree it will come back with all trees in California. When I do a search in Lightroom for Lindstrom Keir I get all photos tagged with both Lindstrom and Keir. I can also do Lindstrom Keir Maple to get all pictures of you in Maple Street. Lightroom even finds tags if you partially match multi-word tags. If you had your photo library stored in Lightroom and it was all properly tagged, you could query vascular Joshua Tree and it would come back with everything tagged “Vascular Plants” and “Joshua Tree National Park”.
Don’t let the shitty tagging supoort I hacked together in 8 eyes sour you to the notion of tags. Lightroom has far more powerful tagging support, allowing you to create tag sets, and apply a set of tags to multiple images. So if you find yourself entering a slew of vascular plants you can create a tag set for vascular plants, with tags for “vascular plant”, “tree”, “conifer”, “fern”, what have you.
If you don’t like tags you can always create collections in lightroom. A photo can belong to multiple collections and a collection can have multiple photos. You can even have virtual copies of your photos (and I have no idea what the fuck those are — I think it means different virtual copies can have different develop settings). I think virtual copies would screw you up though because it might not realize the two different copies are the same if they are in different collection trees.
As far as I know, collections can have as many sub collections as your computer has memory for. I don’t know how possible it is to query against multiple trees like you do in picajet, but let me test it out. [time passes] I just tested throwing some photos into some categories and if I type one word, I get back all photos in the categories that have names with that one word (and all photos tagged with that one word). With the default search settings, if I type two words, I get all photos that are associated with those two words, whether those are collection names, tags, custom metadata, or whatever. For instance, if I had some photos in my lightroom database that had the Photographer set to Keir and a tag of Lindstrom I bet it would show up under a Lindstrom Keir search.
Lightroom is a free trial for 30 days. If you’re serious about trying it out, call me for goodness sake because I have another 30 pages of advice on setting up a lightroom library. Lightroom is very flexible but you need to pick a method of organizing your photos and stick with it! I cannot emphasize this enough! Start small, don’t just import everything in at once! You can have picks/rejects, star ratings, color labels, tags, and collections. Not to mention a shitload of metadata. You have to decide what all that crap means. Me? I just sort everything by date and try to remember what dates I took which pictures. This works about as well with older photos as you can imagine. “Did I take that picture in 2004 or 2003? Have I even imported those photos into Lightroom yet? Dammit!”
February 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I’ve tried Lightroom a bit and it looks like it works like Picajet in many ways. Picajets categories and subcategories are based on keywords. If you treat Lightroom’s keywords like Picajets categories, you can build the same type of category structure. Lightroom lets you do hierarchical keywords. Lightroom’s collection function seems almost worthless in light of this. However, collections might be worthwhile if you don’t want to make keywords to unite certain groups of photos.
When I import photos into Lightroom that have been tagged by Picajet, I get the keywords from Picajet, but I lose the keyword hierarchy. It appears that as a keyword gets deeper into a Picajet subcategory, it gains spaces or some invisible space-like character in front of it. Lightroom has an option to recognize hierarchical keywords when importing, but doesn’t support Picajet’s hierarchy. It would be pretty cool if Lightroom could import based on Picajet’s hierarchy. They might get a lot of Picajet converts.
Assuming that Lightroom’s infinite subcategories actually work unlike Picajet’s, it loses major points on query options. It took some creativity, but I figured out how to do most queries on Lightroom. You can’t do complex queries simply in Lightroom. If I wanted to find all of my plant pictures taken in California except at Pinnacles National Monument, I would have to query plants against California, create a collection out of the results (apparently I found a use for collections), and then query that collection to exclude Pinnacles. It works, but it would be better if I could do this with a single query.
There is one type of query, however, that it appears that Lightroom is incapable of. What if I broadly classify something with the intent of more narrowly classifying it later? With Picajet I can put those photos in an upper level of the hierarchy and then show everything within that keyword while excluding anything already classified in a subcategory of that keyword. For example. I don’t know my insects very well, but I can usually identify them to order. Many I have identified to family, but many I don’t. What if I want to see everything in a particular order that I haven’t already identified to family? I could tag everything that may require further identification with a keyword that will clue me in to this later, but that’s a pain in the ass and I may not always remember to do it. It is so much simpler to click on a keyword and tell it to exclude all subcategories.
All in all, it seems like Lightroom may be my solution. If they improve the query functionality and allow the import of Picajet’s keyword hierarchy, it would probably be foolish not to switch to it. Unless Picajet’s creators get their act together and make Picajet actually function the way they claim it does, I may have no choice but to move on to Lightroom.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
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