One great feature of JPEG images that make them a great asset over, lets say, PNG images is the fact that one can add comments to them. Adding comments is supported directly by Windows so you can always manually add comments to each image one at a time (usually it involves right clicking on the image, going to properties and add/changing the comment). However this can be a big pain and the inconvenience of adding comments is often the reason in why people don’t take advantage of the commenting feature. Well no point in crying about past grievances: let bygones be bygones; say hello to Scott’s JPEG commenter:

Scott’s JPEG commenter is an application that allows you to easily add/modify JPEG comments. As an added bonus there is also a search feature built in so you can search all the comments also.

Scott’s JPEG commenter is very easy to use:

1. Use the folder tree at the upper left to  browse to a directory that contains jpeg files.
2. The ‘file’ list, shown in the above screenshot, will show the JPEG files that are in the folder.
3. Click a file to display it’s comments. The comments will be displayed in the text box at the bottom of the program window: in the comment editor.
4. You may type whatever you want in the comment editor to modify or create a new comment whenever a JPEG file is selected.

To search the comments, simply go to “Search” -> “Find Text in Comments”. You can also just press Ctrl + F5. Type in whatever you want to search for and hit “OK”. The search feature works in the same way as “Ctrl + F” does for, say, Internet Explorer to Firefox: the results will be displayed one image at a time; you must go to “Search” -> “Find Next” or hit F3 to find the next image that matches your search query.

Unfortunately Scott’s JPEG commenter is not a standalone or portable application; you must install it. The installation only takes up 2.4 MB on your hard drive so don’t worry about it being a hard drive hog. Also, keep in mind that the comments you add to JPEG images are stored with the JPEG images themselves; so while Scott’s JPEG commenter is not portable, the comments you add to JPEG images stay with the images no matter what you do with the images. Therefore, you can add comments to images, and put the images on a CD (for example). To view and search the comments all you would have to do is pop the CD into a computer, install Scott’s JPEG commenter and run it. However there is one draw back: the comments created/stored by Scott’s JPEG commenter seem to be in a different “location” then what would happen if you went under “Properties” and changed the comments on an image via Windows directly; Windows (Vista at least) is not able to natively read the comments created by Scott’s. In other words, you need Scott’s to view the comments on JPEG images. This is not that big of a deal since the comments are still stored within the JPEG images themselves like mentioned above but it is worth pointing out.

Lastly, Scott’s JPEG commenter works with “all” Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista. Ready to give Scott’s JPEG commenter a try? You can download it from the following link:

Click here to download Scott’s JPEG commenter