Is it possible to have ZenPhoto pick-up keywords I added for each image in the ORGANIZE tab to be used as tags I noticed that the IPTC data keywords is what is being pulled in as Tags, but unfortunately it seems that you cannot edit the keywords in IPTC data for more than one image at a time in ACDSEE 18.

I have no knowledge about ACDSEE but Zenphoto follows the official specification of metadata. You can read about this here: http://www.zenphoto.org/news/zenphoto-image-metadata-processing.

ok, thank you very much. do you happen to know of any easy way to manage tags offline before i actually upload the photos to zenphoto?

You can edit the IPTC "keywords" using an image editing program. For example, XnView is a free editing program for Windows that can edit the IPTC of an image. When you upload or FTP the image to Zenphoto, Zenphoto will transfer the Metadata over to the database entry for that image. The "keywords" will be transferred as tags.

Note: Just checked and in XnView you can assign tags to mulitple images at once.

awesome, thank you very much.

i also had a reply from acdsee which is useful. they said that if i had created all of my keywords in acdsee 18, i could use acdsee pro 8 to export/import the keywords from their proprietary location to the IPTC fields and this can be done with the free trial version.

thank you,
chris