Metadata Madness
Following a post by Geoff Coupe; Scoble asks for education on what tool support for XMP/IPTC image metadata would bring to users. Well, I for one don't want the time and effort I invest in describing, tagging and categorising digital pictures to lock me into a specific tool. Beyond that, if I want to share that image and its metadata with someone else, I don't want to have to re-key it just because they use different apps from me. It's the old interoperability requirement. (Oh, and the metadata needs to be in the file, not some external database thingy.)
Since I'm sure Scoble knows that, I got to wondering what might be behind the question. The problem is that it's not just one app or one vendor that has this messed up, it's most of them. Some just don't get the whole interop thing while others decide not to tie UI elements to the metadata you'd intuitively expect. It's okay I suppose if you know a little of what your doing, but the industry is doing a big injustice to a whole segment of users coming into digital photography.
Here's some examples from a very quick, non-scientific, review based on apps I just happened to have to hand at the time...
Let's start with the old family favourite Picasa. You can set a caption; assign some labels; add keywords; and assign the picture to a category. The caption and keywords are embedded into the original image (as IPTC metadata) - which is good because then the metadata goes where the image goes. The problem with Picasa is that, from a UI perspective; it's the labels I really want to keep with the image data. Keywords are a real PITA to assign and use in Picasa but labels get used all the time. Worse, Picasa doesn't pick up changes in the caption metadata made by other applications and, although it acts on new keywords added by other apps, it parses some characters (like an underscore) differently and can split a keyword into parts. Oh dear.
Next up the software that comes with my D-SLRs. It does have a feature to set 'keywords', but I don't know what happens to them after that, certainly nothing I used found any corresponding metadata in the image.
Assuming the average user can get the metadata into images in a sensible way, the fun doesn't stop. An obvious use case is to then search on the metadata using something like GDS, but, to quote Carol in Little Britain "computer says no".
The biggest disappointment in this quick plunge into the metadata mess was flickr. It's great that flickr detects keywords and caption information on upload, creating flickr tags corresponding (as you might expect) to the keywords. But what a shame that if you use flickr to add more information, like tags for instance, you don't get that back in the image if you download it. That can't be by design surely? As Stewart Butterfield said "... but they create a pretty artificial kind of lock-in. When you upload your pictures to them, you might upload a three- or four-megapixel image, but all you can get back from them is a 600-pixel image". Well flickr, I want my metadata back too (please).
Any good guys, in this arbitrary and unscientific review? Well Adobe (with PhotoShop and Album) both interoperate with metadata provided by other apps, including Picasa ;-) while even tools like IrfanView and XnView can get it right (for right, read consistent
with what other apps are doing and correctly displaying updates made elsewhere).
Right, I'm off to see if the flickr.api can give me my metadata back, although I might have a quick cuppa first...
Technorati Tags: flickr, metadata, iptc, exif, photography
Since I'm sure Scoble knows that, I got to wondering what might be behind the question. The problem is that it's not just one app or one vendor that has this messed up, it's most of them. Some just don't get the whole interop thing while others decide not to tie UI elements to the metadata you'd intuitively expect. It's okay I suppose if you know a little of what your doing, but the industry is doing a big injustice to a whole segment of users coming into digital photography.
Here's some examples from a very quick, non-scientific, review based on apps I just happened to have to hand at the time...
Let's start with the old family favourite Picasa. You can set a caption; assign some labels; add keywords; and assign the picture to a category. The caption and keywords are embedded into the original image (as IPTC metadata) - which is good because then the metadata goes where the image goes. The problem with Picasa is that, from a UI perspective; it's the labels I really want to keep with the image data. Keywords are a real PITA to assign and use in Picasa but labels get used all the time. Worse, Picasa doesn't pick up changes in the caption metadata made by other applications and, although it acts on new keywords added by other apps, it parses some characters (like an underscore) differently and can split a keyword into parts. Oh dear.
Next up the software that comes with my D-SLRs. It does have a feature to set 'keywords', but I don't know what happens to them after that, certainly nothing I used found any corresponding metadata in the image.
Assuming the average user can get the metadata into images in a sensible way, the fun doesn't stop. An obvious use case is to then search on the metadata using something like GDS, but, to quote Carol in Little Britain "computer says no".
The biggest disappointment in this quick plunge into the metadata mess was flickr. It's great that flickr detects keywords and caption information on upload, creating flickr tags corresponding (as you might expect) to the keywords. But what a shame that if you use flickr to add more information, like tags for instance, you don't get that back in the image if you download it. That can't be by design surely? As Stewart Butterfield said "... but they create a pretty artificial kind of lock-in. When you upload your pictures to them, you might upload a three- or four-megapixel image, but all you can get back from them is a 600-pixel image". Well flickr, I want my metadata back too (please).
Any good guys, in this arbitrary and unscientific review? Well Adobe (with PhotoShop and Album) both interoperate with metadata provided by other apps, including Picasa ;-) while even tools like IrfanView and XnView can get it right (for right, read consistent
with what other apps are doing and correctly displaying updates made elsewhere).
Right, I'm off to see if the flickr.api can give me my metadata back, although I might have a quick cuppa first...
Technorati Tags: flickr, metadata, iptc, exif, photography
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