Where’s the peanut butter?!

Following up on my earlier frustrations with IPTC handling, I’ve found that the free Windows application iTag does basically everything I want with getting IPTC fields set appropriately. You basically…

1. Load a bunch of pictures you want to set tags on
2. Start setting properties - you can select a single picture or a group of pictures
   • iTag’s Title is what irfanview calls the IPTC Headline and this is Flickr’s Title (if there is no IPTC tag value, flickr uses the filename as the title)
   • iTag’s Description is what irfanview calls the IPTC Caption and this is Flickr’s description
   • iTag’s Tags are what irfanview calls the IPTC Keywords and these are also Flickr’s tags
3. Once you’ve started assigning any tags to any individual or group of pictures in the set, they are visible in a pane of available tags for the set so you can more easily assign the same tags to other pictures in the set (avoiding typos or things like creating separate tags for “bear” and “grizzly” if you want them all to be “grizzly bear”)

Once all the tags are set on your pictures locally, you can upload to flickr and it will honor whatever you’d set. The downside (as far as I can tell) is that Windows (XP, at least) doesn’t seem to do IPTC indexing. So now I’ve got hundreds of pictures which I’ve started to catalog using this nice rich format, but I can’t effectively search through the pictures on my computer to find that one with the heart rock. But it’s way better than trying to do this in irfanview or with flickr.

If someone had told me three months ago that I would ever be thinking “Ooh - a half marathon with (allegedly) 2700′ of elevation gain? Great! I could use a break!” I’d have called you crazy, but here I am. I just signed up for the last in the Cougar Mountain Trail Running Series from Seattle Running Company. I’m really looking forward to it. And all I need to do is come close to my pace for the trail run I did in Fairbanks and I’d be setting a new course record for the 13 miler! Which makes me think this is going to be a tough, tough race. But still - I did 19.5 last weekend and haven’t run under 14 on a weekend in over a month so at least right now, I really am looking forward to it.