Sure. My canonical store of photos is held in Windows Photo Gallery 2012. One of my main requirements for photo management is that all the metadata be held (or at a minimum, auto-synced) to the photos themselves; there must be no separate database which, if not backed up, or if the associated software is no longer usable, results in a loss of metadata. I put a lot of work into tagging and organizing my photos, and do not intend to lose it.
I was very pleased to discover f-stop could read and make use of metadata embedded in photos, so this means that I can simply copy the folder with all the .jpg files in onto an SD card to make it available on my tablet or phone. The limitations, for me, are:
1) It does not support hierarchical tags (so my tags tend to end up looking like “Sports/Scuba/Coral” or similar (but at least it plays nicely with search)
2) Captions are difficult to view
3) No support for people tags, not even for search.
Number 3 was the only really irritating one, so after making the request here I spent some time figuring out how to get exiftool to help. I don’t use .xmp files, so I was happy to use them for this purpose; I’d rather not modify the photo files themselves, it makes sync a problem.
So, my current procedure for updating my album on tablet is:
1) Put SD card from tablet into PC
2) Use FreeFileSync to copy any new photo files from the album folder onto the card.
3) Run little batch file which deletes all .xmp files and uses the exiftool command I mentioned above to regenerate them (just in case I’ve updated the people tags of existing photos – but this is rare)
4) Put SD card back into tablet
