Tech and life

I’m off on holiday to the west of Ireland once again in a couple of weeks time, hoping to keep in touch with the tech world using my trusty old Acer Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Yes I know it’s old school – I don’t have a 3G smartphone yet so I have to go this route. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader but this only works when you have an internet connection as it’s an online reader. As I’ll be away from public WiFi most of the time, I need to be able to update the feeds when and where I can and then browse them at my leisure offline. When travelled there 2 years ago, Google Gears was still supported so I could use this to read my feeds in Google Reader offline.  But since then, Google has withdrawn Gears so I looked at the alternative they suggested in that post – Liferea (Linux Feed Reader), a desktop RSS aggregator for Linux.

No problems installing Liferea using

sudo apt-get install liferea

at the command line. To update Liferea with your Reader feeds, just click Subscriptions, New Source and select Google Reader from the dialog. Then enter your Google username and password. I have about 180 subscriptions in Reader and Liferea took about 20-30 minutes to read in all the feeds. And then I deleted the example feeds which weren’t of any use to me.

I’ve installed version 1.6.3 but I get the impression Liferea is very much work in progress or else it doesn’t play nicely with Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. It doesn’t update feeds in alphabetical order although I note this had been added in later releases. Also there’s no indication when it has stopped updating, other than the hard drive LED stops flashing. But apart from that, it seems to present my latest unread posts clearly in offline mode so it’ll do the job I want on holiday. Doubtless I’ll learn much more on how it works ‘at the coal face’.

If you use WiFi, how do you browse your RSS feeds offline? Or is it time for me to get a smartphone? Or should I just switch off on holiday? Drop a comment below.

At some point, you may be required to annotate a PDF with comments, notes or suggested changes and share it, or return it to someone – certainly as a proofreader working with digital media, you’ll have to do this. If you and your colleagues all use Adobe Acrobat Reader you’ll have no problem. But not everyone likes Acrobat Reader as it’s slow, blotted and is known to suffer from malware vulnerabilities. So what happens if you or you colleagues want to share an annotated PDF and you use one of the other popular free PDF viewers like Foxit Reader, Nitro PDF Reader or PDF-XChange Viewer. Can you view annotations or notes created in another PDF reader and importantly can you move those notes if necessary to read the underlying text which can often become obscured by the annotation boxes? Can you assume that your annotations will be viewable, movable and indeed editable in another reader? I had a look at these four PDF readers: I created annotations in each of the four PDF viewers, then tried opening the PDF and viewing, moving and editing that annotation in the others.

What I found was that Acrobat Reader (Sticky Note tool), Foxit (Note Tool) and Nitro (Sticky Note tool) are all compatible. Any note created in one reader could be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the others. Interestingly, Foxit Reader also had a selection of other annotation tools (underline, replace, insert, strikeout, etc) all of which were compatible in the other readers and these annotation boxes could be moved easily and edited in them all.

PDF-XChange Viewer is a little different with other annotation options. It’s my PDF viewer of choice and I’ve blogged about it before. With it, you can annotate with the Callout Tool and Text Box Tool as well as the Sticky Note Tool. Examples are shown below.

Sticky notes were no problem and could be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the other PDF viewers but the Callout boxes and Text Boxes (shown above in red) could only be moved or edited by someone else using PDF-XChange Viewer and so will obscure underlying text when opened in another viewer. I was using the latest version of PDF-XChange Viewer (version 2.5.194). When I used Acrobat Reader to open a PDF annotated by PDF-XChange Viewer, clicking on the Callout boxes or Text boxes would highlight the box handles but I could not move the boxes and so they obscured the underlying text. I did find that Foxit Reader would move the Text box created in PDF-XChange Viewer but if I resized it or moved the Callout box, the text fill would blank out.

So to summarise, if you have to share, send or return an annotated PDF, it looks like the Sticky Note/Note Tool is compatible in all four viewers including Acrobat Reader. Any note can be dragged, minimised, viewed on mouse-over or edited in the other readers. And Foxit Reader has a nice selection of compatible annotation tools. But if you’re using PDF-XChange Viewer, unless you know the other party has PDF-XChange Viewer, it’s best not to use the Callout boxes or Text box tools as the underlying text will be obscured and may be unreadable by the other party if they’re using another viewer.

Incidentally, the PDF used here for illustration is How to Use Jump-Leads. Follow the link for more information.

How do you annotate PDFs? Have you run into problems sharing them? Drop a comment below.

File management in the default setup of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition is not intuitive, at least not to me. I recently had to copy files from a USB stick to my netbook hard disk and found this quite difficult as it seems impossible to pull up a two pane file manager directly and drag the files across – or at least I couldn’t find an obvious way to do it.

Here’s what’s involved:

1. Plug in USB stick. It appears on the Unity side bar and Nautilus opens a window on the desktop. I can see the folders and files on the stick but I can’t get to the home folder on the hard drive and drag the files across – at least not intuitively.

2. Open Files & Folders in the Unity sidebar. But this opens full screen and doesn’t show the pen drive so I still can’t drag the files from the USB stick.

3. Find the Documents folder, then click on the folder symbol at the top right of the screen, as shown above. Finally I have a Nautilus window of the Document folder alongside the Nautilus window of the USB drive.

4. Navigate to the file I want on the USB stick and drag it to the Documents folder on the hard disk.

Out with the old

Perhaps someone can tell me a quicker or easier way to manage files in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition but this is the only way I could see to do it. And I’m not alone as Expert Reviews also found the whole process a little strange. If there is an easier way, it’s certainly not obvious or intuitive for a Ubuntu beginner.

I’m used to working with file managers. I’ve been using them since the late 1980s when I had PC Tools as my file manager in MS-DOS (before Windows). I’ve blogged about xplorer², my current file manager of choice in Windows 7. For me, the file manager is a fundamental utility that I often use during the day and I just couldn’t put up with offering in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. I need a two column manager so I looked around for a decent replacement – one that showed a tree view of folders and drives in the left side and files on the right side and with the dual pane folder option. In the past, I had brief looks at a few including Thunar and Midnight Commander but I think I’ve now found the manager I want in Dolphin.

In with the new

Dolphin is a file manager for KDE (K desktop environment). I found that installation in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition was a breeze and even the necessary KDE libraries installed without a problem. Initially Dolphin will open showing Places (Home, Network, Root, Trash) in the left panel. To get a tree view of folders, go to View, Panels and click Folders. If it opens on the right side of the screen, you can drag the folder window across to the left side if that’s where you want it. You may now see tabs at the bottom where you can select Places or Folders. You can remove Places altogether by going to View, Panels and deselecting Places – or use F9 to toggle Places.

To fine tune your set-up, go to Settings, Configure Dolphin and try out different things. For example, in Startup, set your start up folder. I would have liked the option for Dolphin to close and reopen in the folder I was last working in (as in xplorer²) but couldn’t find that option. Also, if you’ve come from Windows you’ll need to go to Navigation and make sure Double click to open files and folders is selected.

So now plugging in my USB stick, I can access it on the Places panel or more helpfully, on the Folders panel through the folder media. I can now open the folder I want and drag the files across to the hard drive much more easily. There’s also a button at the top to split the files panel if you find that easier.

I did have a problem opening a terminal window (Shift-F4). This should open at the bottom of the screen in the current folder. Just got an error Could not launch the terminal client. KDEInit could not launch konsole. Tried googling for a solution but got nowhere. I’ll just have to use Ctrl-Alt-t if I need the command line. Finally, I decided that I wanted to add Dolphin to the Unity launcher on the left side so I right clicked the icon and clicked on Keep in launcher. However, I found that it would only appear in the Launcher after a reboot.

So that’s my first taste of running a KDE app in Ubuntu and I’m impressed. I might just try Kubuntu on my netbook now.

Google Reader Filter is an excellent tool for filtering out blog posts with keywords that aren’t of any interest to you in your RSS feeds. But if you use the utility CCleaner for your PC maintenance to delete temporary internet files, history and cookies etc., perhaps you’ve noticed that it also strips out all your carefully entered keyword excludes and highlights from Google Reader Filter.

I used to get around this by copying and pasting my keyword excludes and highlights into a text file so I could always paste these back into the filter later. After all, it takes time to build up a good comprehensive list of filter keywords and it’s annoying when you lose them. But this is also a little time consuming to have to repeat this each time you run CCleaner.

So I had a look at the settings in CCleaner to see if there was a way to preserve the Google Reader Filter settings. After a bit of trial and error, I came across the answer. If you open CCleaner and go to Options and choose Cookies:

In the left column, you’ll see a list of cookies which will be deleted next time you run Cleaner. To prevent Google Reader Filter settings from being removed just move all the google cookies (in my case, google.co.uk, google.com, www.google.com) to the right hand Cookies to Keep column as shown above.

Now, when you run Cleaner (the top option in the image above), then reopen Chrome or Firefox, all your Google Reader Filter settings should still be present.

On a side note, in CCleaner, you can also save any other important cookies you want to keep, for example to prevent deletion of specific site log in details after you run CCleaner.

There are quite a few screen capture utilities out there including the basic Windows Snipping Tool which comes with Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is fine for a plain screen capture but if you’re a blogger, sooner or later you’re going to need to be able to annotate and obfuscate (blur) text in the image so an alternative utility has to be found. Here are some points to consider when making your choice.

Able to capture anything on your screen, not just in a browser window

This is the first problem I came across with a number of utilities including Awesome Screenshot, Aviary Screen Capture and other browser extensions which offer screen capture. You may occasionally want to capture part of an image from a file on your computer (not in your browser window), a Word or Excel screenshot, etc. and these in-browser utilities won’t work outside the browser window. Utilities like the Windows Snipping Tool, Greenshot, Shotty or PicPick will be fine here.

Launch from hotkey or delayed launch

Occasionally, you’ll want to capture a pop-up window or a drop-down menu in your screenshot. If you launch your screen capture utility with a mouse click, these windows will disappear. You’ll need to launch from a Hotkey like the Print Screen key so as to retain the pop-up window or drop-down menu on screen. Utilities like the Windows Snipping Tool, Greenshot, Shotty or PicPick will be fine here. Greenshot, Shotty and PicPick launch from Hotkeys and here’s how to  launch the Windows Snipping Tool from a key combination.

Annotate image and obfuscate sensitive text

A utility that doesn’t do this isn’t much use for bloggers. You’ll occasionally need to be able to draw text on the image, highlight parts of the image, draw arrows to point out certain features, and obfuscate (blur) any sensitive text. Utilities like Greenshot or Shotty will mostly work. However, Greenshot has to annotate with text in a text box which you don’t always want. Yes, you can set the box outline to zero width but the text box still obliterates underlying features. Sometimes I just want to add text without a box and without hiding the underlying features. On the other hand, Shotty will do this, but there is no facility to draw arrows in Shotty. However, PicPick is able to annotate text directly on the image, obfuscate text and draw arrows. Here’s a screenshot of a screenshot in PicPick showing blurring, text annotation, box highlighting and arrows.

Of the screen capture utilities I’ve looked at, PicPick is able to do all that I want.

Update (7 April 2012): PicPick can also capture a scrolling window which can be very useful. I understand this was buggy in the past but seems to be working fine on the current version.  Use the Screen Capture utility of PicPick and select Scrolling Window. Move the mouse until the window you want to capture has a red outline border, click the left mouse button then let go and be patient as it scrolls down through the window to the bottom. Then it opens the complete window in the PicPick editor.

Which screen capture utility do you use?  Drop a comment below.

If your Date Modified information in your file manager only shows day and month and not year, there’s a quick fix to get the year back. This seems to affect Windows Explorer, the file manager I use xplorer² and also the date display in my email client Eudora. It may also affect MS Outlook but I can’t confirm this as I don’t use it.

You won’t find a fix in the Options for these programs as they all pull the date information from the Date and Time format settings for your PC. In Windows 7, you’ll have to change the Short Date display to show the year and this will be then used in the other programs. It must have been modified by someone in the past to show only day and month. You can modify  the Short Date format by going to the Start button, Control Panel, Region and Language and on the Format tab, change the Short Date to include the year.

You can set up the Short Date display just as you want it by going to the Additional settings button shown on the image above. Once you apply it, that date format including the year will show up in your date information in your file manager.

I thought I knew Word… or at least everything I needed to know. But still little surprises come along and you just wonder how you’ve missed them in the past.

I wrote a post about the new search in Word 2010 and Karen left a comment on that post offering this awesome tip. If you’ve used Word you’ll know that one annoyance of search in earlier versions of Word was the way the search box would jump around all over the document when you clicked the Find Next button often obscuring the document and the search results. That’s been improved in Word 2010 as I mentioned in the earlier post, but Karen pointed out that once you hit Ctrl-F and enter your search term in the navigation panel if you then close the dialog box in the left margin and then hit Ctrl-PgDn, it repeats the search without calling the dialog box! Awesome. You can search down through all the occurrences of your search phrase just by using this keyboard combination and without the annoyance of the search box obscuring your document and results. And, wait for it, Ctrl-PgUp runs back up through the search occurrences. And this tip also works in the so-called Advanced Find in Word 2010 – that’s the old style search pre-Word 2010. I mentioned how to access that in the earlier post. In addition, you can even resume the search after doing some typing by just pressing Ctrl-PgDn or Ctrl-PgUp again. I’ve found that this tip also works in Word 2007 and Word 2002 and probably other versions too.

No doubt if I’d taken the time to carefully read through one of the Word cheat sheets I’ve downloaded in the past I would have known this tip already. So I’ll just past it on here in the hope that someone else out there will benefit from it.

Got any good Word tips? Drop a comment below.

This is a guest post by Liz Cornwell. She is @Aussie_Sheila on Twitter.

Everybody hates slow computers, but only a relatively small part of computer users try to do something about it and make their sluggish systems faster. Most people just assume that computer slow-downs mean it’s time to get a new one. They don’t even think about doing some maintenance and tweaking some settings with the help of various utilities. And that can make a lot of difference.

These days there are a lot of computer speed-up programs to choose from. Some of them have a limited number of tools, whereas others offer extensive functionality.

Auslogics BoostSpeed is one of the programs that have all the tools needed to speed up, optimize, and protect a computer. This program has more than 18 tools and a no-nonsense approach. Rather than providing dubious speed-up tweaks, this application focuses on genuine optimization techniques, such as disk cleanup, hard drive and registry defragmentation along with tweaking and optimizing Windows settings.

Auslogics BoostSpeed has an intuitive tabbed interface, which makes it very easy to navigate the program. You can choose to either perform quick auto-optimization or use the program’s advanced tools for extensive tweaking. When you first open the program, you will be prompted to run a system scan and repair errors. There is also a Quick Tasks bar on the right-hand side where you can erase browser and Windows history, cleanup temporary files, and optimize memory. These features are great for those who are looking for hassle-free one-stop maintenance software.

On the second tab you will find a very useful tool called System Advisor. This tool scans your computer and tells you what exactly is slowing you down, which errors need fixing, which security settings need to be changed, and which services are not in use and can be disabled. System Advisor is very quick and exceptionally easy to use even for complete computer novices.

The third tab displays a system information summary. There are four graphs that show CPU, RAM, disk, and network usage. This tab is really useful if you need to monitor your resource usage and computer activity.

The fourth tab allows the user to access all BoostSpeed’s tools. The tools are grouped together into nine categories – Disk Maintenance, Registry Maintenance, Free Up Space, System Status, Software Control, Privacy, System Tweaks, Speed Up Internet, and Disaster Recovery.

The Disk Maintenance section has all the necessary utilities to cleanup, defragment, and repair hard drives. The Disk Cleanup tool identifies and deletes junk files that take up valuable space. Disk Defrag defragments and optimizes files and free space on your hard drive, which speeds up access to files and folders. Disk Doctor is very similar to Chkdsk, but it has more options and its interface is a lot nicer. Cleaning up the drives once a week and defragmenting them once a month can make a lot of difference and make your computer run a lot faster.

The Registry Maintenance category provides access to Registry Cleaner and Registry Defrag. Both tools are very fast and efficient and it’s nice that Registry Defrag doesn’t lock up the computer when running (some registry defragmenters do that). Defragmenting the registry is probably even more important than registry cleanup, because it helps to free up RAM and makes your computer run more efficiently.

The Free Up Space category has a duplicate file finder and a tool called Disk Explorer. Disk Explorer is very useful if you are short on hard drive space and need to identify the largest files and folders on your disk, so that you can move them to a removable drive.

If you want to get to know your computer better, then have a look at the System Status section. There you will be able to get a lot of information about your computer, such as hardware and software configuration, running applications, processes, and locked files, as well as Windows services. One of the tools, Auslogics Task Manager, is a real gem and a great standard task manager alternative, as it provides a lot more information about everything running on your computer. This little application is part of BoostSpeed, but it can also be downloaded separately and is absolutely free to use.

When you have all the system information you need, you can move to Software Control. There you can disable unnecessary startup entries and uninstall unused programs.

Unlike a lot of similar programs, Auslogics BoostSpeed pays a lot of attention to protecting your privacy. There are tools to securely shred files, clean-wipe free disk space, and remove history traces, so that no data can be recovered.

If you want to fix faulty Windows settings and optimize them for your hardware configuration and Internet connection, use Tweak Manager, Service Manager, and Internet Optimizer. These tools will speed up your computer by simply fine-tuning Windows and disabling everything you don’t use.

And last but not least, BoostSpeed is absolutely safe to use because it backs up all changes that are made to your computer. But there’s more – it can also recover files that you’ve either lost or deleted by accident.

Auslogics BoostSpeed comes with a 15-day trial and costs 49.95USD (1 year license for up to 3 PCs). If you don’t feel like spending money on the software just yet, Auslogics has some freeware applications that can be used to perform basic computer maintenance: Auslogics Disk Defrag, Auslogics Registry Cleaner, Auslogics Duplicate File Finder, and Auslogics Task Manager.

About the Author: Liz Cornwell is a freelance writer who specializes in computer optimization, Windows tips and tricks, and software reviews. In addition to that, Liz is a regular contributor at the Element Moscow magazine – a top entertainment publication for expats living in Moscow, Russia.

I was given a 300 page 13MB PDF today and had to extract a single page from it as a PDF. I don’t have Adobe Acrobat so had to find a quick, free way to do it. A Google search identified a number of free utilities but I wanted to make use of what I already had on my PC. Then it struck me. I already had the utility doPDF to ‘print’ Word files as PDFs and I’ve blogged about this before. So I could probably also extract a single page PDF from my multipage PDF.

And it worked. Once doPDF is installed, and you open the multipage PDF in your reader, an option to print to doPDF is added to your Print menu so that anything that goes to your printer can also go to create a PDF file – so on your Print menu you select either a single page or a range of pages to print to a PDF file. I use Nitro PDF Reader as my PDF viewer but I’m sure this will also work with Foxit Reader and other pdf viewers.

I’m sure many of you use photo management packages to browse through thumbnails of your photos downloaded from your camera to your PC. Popular photo management packages are Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery and of course the viewers in paid packages like Adobe Photoshop Elements. But how many of you actually tag your photos with keywords to help searching through your photo folders for the photos you want? I tried keyword tagging for a short while some years ago but gave it up once I discovered that in some management packages the tags you’ve painstakingly added to your photos don’t transfer to a different software package, i.e. they are held in a proprietary database in the software package and not within the photo itself. So I gave up then and just stuck with FastStone Image Viewer, a nice photo viewer and editor but without the facility to tag photos with keywords.

Some five or six years on, and a little wiser hopefully, I thought I’d revisit the subject of photo tagging and see how the current crop of photo management packages deal with it. I’ve specifically stuck with free apps or software that have free versions with more limited features to see if I could find what I wanted for free. That’s not to say of course that in future some of these apps will move to a paid or freemium model.

So I’ve gone back through my Delicious bookmarks over the last couple of years and looked at all the apps I’ve tagged ‘photo-tagging’. I haven’t looked at online photo management apps or tagging a la Facebook, just apps to manage your photo collection on your desktop. I’ve used the following four criteria to select apps which will tag photos the way I want.

1. Keywords in file rather than proprietary database

Tagging in photo management packages can basically be divided into two types. Apps that store the keywords within the photo file itself, as say IPTC tags, and apps that store the tags in a separate proprietary database. Clearly in the first type, the keywords move with the files and can be accessed in different management packages that use this format for storing keywords. In the second type, if you move to a different photo management app in the future, all your keywords will probably be left behind in the old software database. If you’re not sure if your photo management package is saving tags as IPTC keywords, install Irfanview and open your photo in it, click the Image Information button at the top, then click the IPTC info button at the bottom left corner. Then click the Keywords tab and see what’s there – your IPTC keywords should show here.

Because we’re all fickle and like to move around and try different packages and because some apps cease development or are likely to change to a freemium model, I believe it’s important to choose a package where the keyword tags are held in a standard format within the photo, so will move with the photo file and can be accessed in other photo organizers.

2. Folder versus album

If you’ve messed around with different photo organizers, you’ll know that there are basically two ways to browse the photos on your disk. Folder based organizers which just access and display the photo folders on your hard drive, and album based organizers which import your photos into a catalogue or album, possibly from a number of folders on your hard drive. I personally prefer the folder based organizer as that’s the way my folders are organized on my PC and I’ve become familiar with that over the years. As I’ve mentioned, the album based approach has the disadvantage of locking up information in a proprietary format. If you change software for whatever reason, you’re probably going to have to recreate your albums.

3. Group tag photos

Being able to select a group of photos and assign a keyword tag or tags to them all at once is obviously a massive timesaver compared with tagging them individually.

4. Search for and display only photos with specific tag(s)

I want to be able to pull out and display only those photos which have specific keyword tag(s); seems like a reasonable request. Incidentally, one other advantage I’ve discovered with IPTC style keyword tags is that Windows search (click Start button and enter search term in box) will pull up photos with your tag. Very useful, particularly when the photo file name is some cryptic camera derived label.

The winners

Of the packages I looked at, only two fulfilled all four criteria I’ve just listed: Zoner Photo Studio, and Windows Live Photo Gallery, while Picasa came close.

Zoner Photo Studio: My personal favourite. The user interface looks nice, and has all the tagging features I want: folder display, IPTC keywords, group tagging, and searching for tag combinations. In addition, a query I had was quickly answered on their forums.

Windows Live Photo Gallery: Couldn’t fault this also, just preferred the display in Zoner Photo Studio. Windows Photo Gallery has a plainer display, not so much info is displayed with each thumbnail. Keywords are called Descriptive Tags, and you can also draw boxes round faces and assign what are called People Tags to the faces in each photo. But no face recognition… as yet.

Picasa: Many people’s choice as a photo organizer but I personally don’t like the way it organizes photos into its own directory system. Assigning keywords was straightforward and there were no problems group tagging photos but I couldn’t work out how to select and display a combination of two keyword tags. It’ll probably do it, but I didn’t find it intuitive like the two I’ve just mentioned. On the plus side, it does have automatic facial recognition so you can assign People tags here too.

I must mention Irfanview in passing, again a popular free editing choice. It’s possible to enter keyword data in Irfanview (as I’ve mentioned above) which will be used in the above three packages. But of course Irfanview doesn’t permit thumbnail viewing of a complete photo directory or selecting photos by keyword. Updated (21-1-11): Irfanview does allow thumbnail viewing and batch adding of IPTC data. See comments below.

The rest

I’ll list the apps I looked at which for one reason or another, didn’t meet my criteria, generally because they stored keyword tags in a proprietary fashion if at all or had limited features in the free versions. I’ll just list the app names without links: Pictomio, Snapact Photo Manager, My Photo Index, Shotwell, Studioline Photo Basic 3, Album Burger, Inzomia Viewer 3, JetPhoto Studio 4.8, Pica Jet, iTag, Stoik Imagic 5, PhotoMeister, XnView and Fotobounce. Of these, iTag came closest but would only save up to 3 tags in a photo in the free version. I only had a quick look at all these so if you think they might be useful for keyword tagging drop a comment below.

Conclusion

So for me, Zoner Photo Studio stands out for tagging and photo management and my thanks to Raju at Technically Personal for blogging about it and drawing it to my attention although I’ve found that the Free edition is superior to the Xpress edition, particularly for keyword tagging. I’ve switched to Zoner from Faststone Image Viewer and am happily tagging all my photos there.

If I’ve misrepresented any photo management app or missed any and you think they might be suitable for photo tagging, please let me know in the comments. Do you tag your photos? How?

Update (27-10-10): Thanks to Steve in the comments who corrected me on two points. Picasa will do a tree view of folders and Irfanview does allow thumbnail viewing of directories. Nice to know.

Update (21-1-11): And Henk adds that IrfanView can also (batch) add IPTC tags to images selected in the thumbnail viewer. Check his comment below.