Does such a mapping/image labeling program exist?

[supermonkeyjoe]

Hi Playground, I'm hoping your collective knowledge can help me out here,

I'm looking for a windows based program, preferably free, that will allow me to assign labels to an image and easily edit them, basically what I want is to be able to import a map of the game world and assign notes to certain areas of it that I can then go back and change as the state of the world changes.

More in depth information of anyone who is interested: I want to import the map of Sharn from the Eberron Campaign Setting and note in each district which faction has the greatest presence there, if other factions are trying to muscle in, NPC notes and other such information that will change as the campaign goes on. Essentially there is a giant game of Risk going on behind the scenes and the PCs are the wildcard that can swing events in favour of one faction or another. I just need a decent way of keeping track of it all.

[1337 b4k4]

You could probably do it with MapTool if you wanted. Otherwise, any image editing program that can save and edit layers would work for you, just save the text as different layers. PhotoLine is a decent shareware program that can do that.

[onthetown]

Roll20 is a newer program that allows you to import maps and place tokens and text on them and do all sorts of other fun stuff. It's supposed to be used as a virtual tabletop, but you could easily just use it for your DMing notes.

Edit: You can then send your players the link to the "campaign" and allow them to see the map, and you can change it right in front of their eyes or fog of war parts out.

[Memphos]

I'd suggest Campaign Cartographer. Here it is a tutorial on how to use it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLaTKOJC6og

it's a good program, I am not able to use it fully because I get some errors when I try to make something particular and I lost interest, but take a look

Edit: Oh, I Missed you want a free program...well, take a look anyway =D

[inexorabletruth]

Gimp can do this. It's free. It's like PhotoShop, but not nearly as good. You can put your regions on one layer (for your world map), cities on another layer (for when you want to zoom in), villages and trade routes on another layer (for when you really want to zoom in), and a goblin waving at the satellite camera on the next layer (if you want to simulate Google Earth).

Also, for lower-tech, you can just use any PDF reader already available on your computer. They can make annotations which can be minimized, so they won't take up space when the information isn't immediately relevant.