If you’ve been to as many Chicago tech meetups as we have this spring, you’ve got the same problem we do: a hard drive full of event photos and no good way to sort out who’s who. After TECH cocktail 4 we came home with something like four hundred shots between three cameras, and matching names to faces a week later is its own special kind of misery.

A few of you have asked what we use. Honestly, for the WindyBits event coverage it’s still mostly Flickr sets and a lot of patience. But a couple of the organisers around town have started leaning on dedicated photo-list and group-shot software to keep the bigger events straight — the kind of thing that lets you tag a group shot once and have everyone’s name actually stick.

It turns out this little category of consumer software has been quietly maturing for a while now. A roundup over at TechnologyStory’s coverage of consumer photo and event-management tools walks through how these packages grew out of the old collection-cataloguing world and into something a meetup organiser can actually use without cracking a manual. Worth a read if you’re the one stuck building the attendee photo album after every event.

For our part we’ll keep muddling through with Flickr for now, but if your group is running events bigger than the back room of a bar, it’s probably time to look at something purpose-built. Got a workflow that works for you? Drop us a line and we’ll round up the best ones in a follow-up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:20 am and is filed under TechBits. Both comments and pings are currently closed.