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May 18, 2006. Ashburn, VA, USA
Summary To address challenges of managing tsunami of digital photos, Cogitum LC, a softwaredeveloping company, based at Ashburn, VA, announced today release of FotoTagger, anew personal free software tool for image annotation and sharing.
With FotoTagger, users can annotate images by adding easy-to-hide movable notes todigital pictures. Once annotated, the images can be instantly found by textual notesand published to blogs directly from FotoTagger.
Challenges FotoTagger addresses three main challenges in managing digital pictures by providingthe following features:
1) Keeping image details forever: Every user definitely has experience of forgettingnames of people or objects presented on photos. Attempts to include relevantinformation as a part of a file name or to add keywords are often inconvenient andinefficient when it comes to identification of people or objects.
On the other hand, having names and comments placed directly on digital photos isuseful only when a user is able to easily hide these annotations and view anoriginal image. This is exactly what FotoTagger basically does.
Currently, FotoTagger is already used for annotating travel photos, family pictures,and paintings.
2) Finding needed images immediately: For most users, wasting time trying to find aphoto with a specific person or object is a usual exercise. FotoTagger provides anability to reach a desired image by searching across textual notes. This capabilitylets users perform a meaningful search and rely on what is presented on a picturerather than on formal parameters, like a file name or an image creation date.
3) Sharing annotated images by using standard blogs: Many users often want to shareimages along with some textual comments and explanations. A real value of photosharing can be often measured not just in a number of photos. In some cases, it isdetermined by few pictures with reasonable annotation. That is why FotoTaggersupports publishing to blogs as a form of photo sharing.
FotoTagger helps users publish images with additional text explanations to a blogjust in a few clicks so annotated pictures can be easily shared with other people.The current version of FotoTagger supports publishing to Blogger.com andLiveJournal. Alternatively, annotated images can be also shared through email andexporting to HTML for easy publishing in the Web.
Distribution 3F distribution principle: Current personal version of FotoTagger supports whatcould be called "3F principle" F1: Free of charge; F2: Free of ads; F3: Free ofspyware and privacy intrusion.
FotoTagger can be downloaded from the Cogitum Web site www.fototagger.com andnumerous download Web sites. The product Web site provides various examples ofpossible FotoTagger applications, help documentation, and FAQ.
The current version supports several photo management features, such as imagerotation, image re-size, fit screen, sending an annotated image by email, supportfor annotation in most alphabetic languages, as well as export of an annotated imageto HTML and export of tags to XML.
Technically, all annotations are embedded into an image file so they cannot be lostor disassociated with the picture. An original image is never distorted thanks toignoring FotoTagger annotations by all other image viewers, including browsers.Similarly, uninstalling FotoTagger will not change or damage images. FotoTaggerworks with JPEG files.
Cogitum has also suggested an open standard for storing and visualizing annotations.The standard is based on the existing standards for digital images.
Appeal to history: FotoTagger is probably the first and only software product thatproudly claims utilizing three thousand years traditions. The blog associated withthe program developer demonstrates that many cultures in the history used text overimage with traditional image media. FotoTagger just restores this tradition todigital images.
Company: Cogitum is an innovative software developing company with severalaward-winning personal software tools, including Co-Tracker and Co-Citer that gainedtotal hundreds of thousands downloads.
Contacts: Cogitum, 21339 Fairhunt Drive, Ashburn, VA 20148 USA, phone:1-703-858-2377, fax: 1-703-858-5343
Blog: www.text-over-image.blogspot.c om
Downloads: www.fototagger.com, www.cogitum.com
