The New Version of the FotoTagger Image Annotation Tool Makes Image Annotation more Convenient

ASHBURN, VA, USA – November 20, 2006. Cogitum LC, a provider of software for personal content management, has released FotoTagger 2.1 (http://www.fototagger.com), the new version of its popular image annotation program.

FotoTagger is a free desktop tool designed for both personal and professional users of digital images, including users of photo cameras, professional photographers, travelers, family historians, genealogists, and documentation managers. It lets them effectively record and share information about content of images, as well as make image search much more relevant and precise.

Every person who has digital photos faces the problem of forgetting valuable information about people or objects captured on an image. Moreover, as the number of images grows, an ability to quickly find the desired image becomes crucial. FotoTagger eliminates this problem by allowing users to annotate individual elements or parts of the image. Users can place easy-to-hide annotation tags directly on a picture in order to describe specific objects. Each tag can have an arbitrary location and contain a free text capturing the names of the people, links to Web sites or other images, explanations, translations of inscriptions, and more. The tags can be hidden in a click of a button so the original view is never spoiled.

As images are annotated, FotoTagger lets users easily find people or objects by their names or other text typed in the tags across piles of digital pictures. With FotoTagger, there is no need to use old-fashion techniques trying to meaningfully name the file or create a hierarchy of folders on a hard disk. A user can enter the name of a person and FotoTagger will find all pictures where this person is captured.

To let users share annotation with an image wherever it goes, annotation tags are embedded in an ordinary JPEG file meaning the image content description always stays with the image itself. With FotoTagger, users can publish tagged photos to Blogger.com, LiveJournal, as well as to their own Web sites. Flickr users can use FotoTagger as a desktop enhancement of their Flickr accounts. They can tag photos with FotoTagger and upload them to a Flickr set in a click of a button. FotoTagger tags are converted into editable Flickr notes. Moreover, photos hosted on Flickr can be downloaded to FotoTagger with Flickr notes transformed to editable FotoTagger tags.

FotoTagger 2.1 makes image annotation more convenient for a user and provides new opportunities for integration with image editing applications:

- Matte. Matte is a blank resizable and movable space around the image that allows placing textual annotations out of image borders and keeping them visible when the image is shared.

- Zoom in/out. With the new version of FotoTagger, a user can easily zoom in and zoom out an image. Zooming is applied to image view only so it does not affect the actual size of the image.

- Editing an image in an external image editing software while preserving annotations. Saving an annotated image in an image editing program that does not support FotoML, the format used by FotoTagger for storing annotations, can cause removing annotations from the JPEG file. To let a user preserve the work, FotoTagger provides a special mechanism that temporarily saves annotations in an external file when an image editor is launched and puts annotations back when editing is finished.

The current personal version of FotoTagger supports what could be called “3F principle” F1: Free of charge; F2: Free of ads; F3: Free of spyware and privacy intrusion.

FotoTagger can be downloaded from the official product Website http://www.fototagger.com.

About Cogitum LC
Cogitum is an innovative software developing company with several award-winning personal software tools, including Co-Tracker and Co-Citer that gained total hundreds of thousands downloads.

More information can be obtained by contacting a company representative at 1-703-858-2377 or by contacting Leonid Malkov at Lmalkov@cogitum.com.