Organising images.

Are there any cheap or preferably free programs that allow you to browse/catalogue images with a tagging system ?

ie: You could tag each image with keywords that you could then search for later when looking for a particular image. Kinda similar to Flickr but in a desktop application.

Ideally it would support PEF files but that's not essential.

Cheers, Bob

I enjoy working with Photoshop Elements 6, which comes with an integrated Organizer. It supports JPEG as well as RAW (PEF) formats. And for the quality and usefulness, I find it very reasonably priced.

You can label with Adobe bridge (which I have) but you have to create keywords in a separate panel & then tick them for each image. I'd prefer something where you could type keywords in for each image.
It does support PEF's though. Which is handy as I intend to save my keepers in both Raw & Tiff, & also keep the shots with potential as Raw, so I can return to them for some PP practice on rainy days.

Lightroom handles metadata very well but sadly it isn't cheap.

Picasa 3 is pretty good for browsing and will read PEF files but I do not know what its metadata handling is like.

Best wishes, Kris,

Ok so I had what I needed all along. I'm running Vista & it has a Windows Photo Gallery - I had no idea it was there. You can tag images very easily & the search function is easy to use to. Who'd have thought that Microsoft would have made something user friendly (even if I didn't know it was there)

I've downloaded the PEF & DNG codecs for Vista & now I'm good to go. I'm much happier now, as I thought Adobe Bridge was terrible. Might be good for a pro's workflow perhaps but it's far too complicated for my liking.

I was going to suggest Windows photo gallery to you
I use PSE 6 for organising my photos, just because it's what I use for processing them also, but I did look at the Microsoft gallery too.