Released on = May 18, 2006, 3:29 am

Press Release Author = Cogitum LC

Industry = Internet & Online

Press Release Summary = To address challenges of managing tsunami of digital photos,
Cogitum LC, a software developing company, based at Ashburn, VA, announced today
release of FotoTagger, a new personal free software tool for image annotation and
sharing.

With FotoTagger, users can annotate images by adding easy-to-hide movable notes to
digital pictures. Once annotated, the images can be instantly found by textual notes
and published to blogs directly from FotoTagger.

Press Release Body = FotoTagger - a new personal tool for photo annotation and sharing

May 18, 2006. Ashburn, VA, USA

Summary
To address challenges of managing tsunami of digital photos, Cogitum LC, a software
developing company, based at Ashburn, VA, announced today release of FotoTagger, a
new personal free software tool for image annotation and sharing.

With FotoTagger, users can annotate images by adding easy-to-hide movable notes to
digital pictures. Once annotated, the images can be instantly found by textual notes
and published to blogs directly from FotoTagger.

Challenges
FotoTagger addresses three main challenges in managing digital pictures by providing
the following features:

1) Keeping image details forever: Every user definitely has experience of forgetting
names of people or objects presented on photos. Attempts to include relevant
information as a part of a file name or to add keywords are often inconvenient and
inefficient when it comes to identification of people or objects.

On the other hand, having names and comments placed directly on digital photos is
useful only when a user is able to easily hide these annotations and view an
original 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 a
photo with a specific person or object is a usual exercise. FotoTagger provides an
ability to reach a desired image by searching across textual notes. This capability
lets users perform a meaningful search and rely on what is presented on a picture
rather 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 share
images along with some textual comments and explanations. A real value of photo
sharing can be often measured not just in a number of photos. In some cases, it is
determined by few pictures with reasonable annotation. That is why FotoTagger
supports publishing to blogs as a form of photo sharing.

FotoTagger helps users publish images with additional text explanations to a blog
just in a few clicks so annotated pictures can be easily shared with other people.
The current version of FotoTagger supports publishing to Blogger.com and
LiveJournal. Alternatively, annotated images can be also shared through email and
exporting to HTML for easy publishing in the Web.

Distribution
3F distribution principle: 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 Cogitum Web site www.fototagger.com and
numerous download Web sites. The product Web site provides various examples of
possible FotoTagger applications, help documentation, and FAQ.

The current version supports several photo management features, such as image
rotation, image re-size, fit screen, sending an annotated image by email, support
for annotation in most alphabetic languages, as well as export of an annotated image
to HTML and export of tags to XML.

Technically, all annotations are embedded into an image file so they cannot be lost
or disassociated with the picture. An original image is never distorted thanks to
ignoring FotoTagger annotations by all other image viewers, including browsers.
Similarly, uninstalling FotoTagger will not change or damage images. FotoTagger
works 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 that
proudly claims utilizing three thousand years traditions. The blog associated with
the program developer demonstrates that many cultures in the history used text over
image with traditional image media. FotoTagger just restores this tradition to
digital images.

Company: 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.

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.com

Downloads: www.fototagger.com, www.cogitum.com

Web Site = http://www.fototagger.com

Contact Details = Address: 21339 Fairhunt Drive, Ashburn
USA

Phone Number: 703-858-2377
Email: tagger@fototagger.com