Category: Photography

Once again, Microsoft demonstrates that its left hand seemingly hasn’t got a clue what its right hand is doing.

The OneDrive team has been making “improvements” to the OneDrive service. A couple of weeks ago they blogged about these.

A couple of days ago, Martin tried to send some photos of the garden to a friend. He uses Windows Live Mail (WLM) as his email program. This has a very nice feature that allows the easy creation of a photo album in an email, and it uses OneDrive. What happens is that WLM will create a folder in your OneDrive to hold the full-size photos, upload those into OneDrive for you, and use thumbnails in the email message. So the email is small and efficient, and the recipient can view the photos in the OneDrive folder.

As I say, it’s a nice feature, and very easy to use.

Except that this time, the email got stuck in WLM’s outbox; it would never complete the publishing process. We tried it a couple of times, and the result was always the same.

It turns out that this problem is hitting a lot of people who are using the Photo Album feature in WLM. It’s been caused by a change made by the OneDrive team in the OneDrive service.

Clearly, no-one in the OneDrive team uses Windows Live Mail. It’s probably too old-school for them. I have a strong suspicion that Microsoft would love to drop WLM and the rest of the Windows Essentials software suite. It hasn’t had an update for several years now.

The big question now is what will Microsoft do? Will the OneDrive team fix the issue, and restore the photo album feature to WLM users? Or, as I fear will be the case, will this just be ignored in an attempt to shift users away from WLM and onto the Mail app that will be delivered in Windows 10? Conspiracy theorists will probably surmise that this breaking of WLM is a deliberate move on the part of Microsoft. I suspect it was probably unintentional, but it does now provide a useful lever to Microsoft to drive users away from future use of WLM. So I don’t think we will see a fix…

Addendum: 8 July 2015. Well, I may be wrong. It looks as though the issue has been fixed. No official word from Microsoft, one way or another, but photo albums do now seem to be getting through…

Addendum: 13 October 2016. It turns out we only had a temporary reprieve. What appears to be happening is that Microsoft is making changes to its Outlook infrastructure in the cloud, and these break the photo feature in WLM. There’s no chance that Microsoft will reverse these changes, and equally no chance that they will adjust WLM to fix the issue. Sigh.

I’ve been complaining for nearly four years now that Microsoft’s OneDrive does not support searching of photo metadata. In July 2013, I was told by a Microsoft project manager:

“this work just ranks lower on the priority list than some other things we are doing right now”

In May 2014, Microsoft trumpeted that they had made improvements to the OneDrive service, but proper support for Tags (in photo metadata) still wasn’t there. So searching for a Tag (for example: “Clouds”) in all the photos I have stored in OneDrive returned zero results:

And that’s where things stood right up to the last time I tried the experiment, which was earlier this month.

Today, I thought that I would try once again, and this time, to my surprise and delight, there was a result:

As you can see from the information pane on the right, the selected photo does indeed have the descriptive tag “clouds” included in the photo metadata.

There have been some other changes to the OneDrive service as well. If I look at a photo in OneDrive, instead of being able to open up an information pane to display all the photo metadata, there is now an information icon shown in the bottom right of the window:

Clicking/Touching that icon now displays the photo metadata in an overlay instead of in an adjacent pane:

I’m really pleased that this support for Tags, and being able to search on them is finally included in OneDrive. In one way, it really had to be, because Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and will be removing the ability to search OneDrive files in the Windows Explorer in Windows 10, at least in the initial release of Windows 10.

What Microsoft giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other…

Addendum 5th October 2024: And now Microsoft has silently removed this feature – OneDrive will no longer search tags in photos. Damn them.

I’m an amateur photographer. I’m not a good photographer, but occasionally, more by luck than judgement, I take a photo that looks pretty good to me. Almost as important to me as the image is the information describing the photo; when it was taken, where, the subject – that sort of thing. In technical terms, this is the photo’s metadata.

I’ve been trying to capture, and manage, this sort of information since  2005, and have tried a lot of software applications in the process. In 2007, I settled on IDimager as the most suitable tool for what I was looking for. It was what I used for tagging my photos.

Two years ago, IDimager was suddenly withdrawn from the market by the company, and replaced by Photo Supreme. After my initial shock, I switched to Photo Supreme, and after an uncertain start, I found that it was, in large part, covering my requirements for a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool.

This week, version 3 of Photo Supreme is announced. It has over 150 additions and improvements over version 2.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the beta testers for version 3. It is definitely a big step forward from version 2 (which in itself was a very good tool), so version 3 has become my DAM tool of choice going forward. I’m also a Lightroom 5 Standalone user, but the only reason I have that is for its image processing capabilities. The metadata handling of Photo Supreme strikes me as being head and shoulders above what Lightroom currently has to offer.

It supports a wide range of photo metadata standards out of the box: Exif, IPTC Core, Extension and Plus. I can now automatically synchronize entries for the IPTC Extension fields for “Person In Image”, “Places”, and “Event” IPTC fields – something that I had to do manually in V2. It also now supports the Image Region metadata standard defined by the Metadata Working Group – the same standard used by Google’s Picasa for People Tags. That means that as well as being able to list the people appearing in a photo, I can now show their names on the photo itself.

If you’re looking for a good tool to manage your photo metadata, take a look at Photo Supreme.

The standards organisation IPTC has just published the results of a test of commonly available software to find out how effective different tools are in writing, editing and reading rights data in an image.

I’m pleased to see that Photo Supreme, the software I use for managing my photos, has come out well.

Update 23 January 2015: OneDrive now searches Tags – at last! So please treat what follows as a historical post illustrating the situation as it was up until January 2015…

Update 8 October 2015: And now Tags added to photos via OneDrive online will get added to the photos’ metadata, and thus also be synced back down to the photos held in OneDrive on your PCs.

Update 5 October 2024: And now Microsoft has removed the ability to search tags in photos stored in OneDrive. They have rendered OneDrive useless for managing photos.

Microsoft has recently added some new features to OneDrive, listed in the OneDrive Blog: Updating OneDrive: Five New Features You Asked For.

Unfortunately, the five do not include one that I (and others) have been requesting for the past three years: proper support for tags in photo metadata.

Interestingly, one thing has changed, there is now a “Tags” heading displayed along with the “People tags” heading in the information pane for a photo. This returns a feature that was removed in June 2011. However, this does not yet seem to be fully working. Let me try and illustrate this.

First, here’s the new view of a folder of photos on OneDrive; it has larger thumbnails than the previous version:

Now let’s look at an individual photo using OneDrive, and show the metadata stored in the photo displayed in the information panel on the right:

Notice how OneDrive claims there are no descriptive tags in this photo, by the fact that under the “Tags” heading, there is only the link to add a tag.

However, this photo (like all the photos I have on OneDrive) has been tagged. I can show this by downloading a copy of this photo to my PC (by clicking on the “Download” link shown at the top of the OneDrive window), and then using Microsoft’s Photo Gallery to display the metadata in its information panel:

You can see that there are both Descriptive tags (clouds, lake, Reeuwijkse Plassen) and Location metadata (Reeuwijk, Zuid Holland – what Microsoft wrongly calls geotags; they are in fact more properly called geocodes) in this photo, and they were not being displayed in OneDrive.

And then I discovered something really interesting. When I went back to displaying this photo in OneDrive, suddenly the Descriptive tags were showing up:

I can only conclude that the act of downloading the file has triggered a process in OneDrive to start displaying the tags in this file. All the other photos in the folder did not have any tags being displayed. As a further test, I downloaded another photo in the folder, and then went back to look at the photo in OneDrive. Lo and behold, that photo now had its descriptive tags displayed:

This is clearly a step forward, but it’s still a broken experience. We should not have to download every file in order to get the descriptive tags to display.

And descriptive tags are still not being searched in OneDrive. That first sample photo has a descriptive tag “clouds” in it (to be strictly correct, it has a hierarchical tag Objects/built environment/settlements and landscapes/skyscapes/clouds), but doing a search for it in OneDrive produces no results:

According to Microsoft’s Omar Shahine: “this work just ranks lower on the priority list than some other things we are doing right now”.

I just hope that the work remains on the list of things to do, and that this broken experience doesn’t last for too long.

Addendum: A word of warning. Do not use the “Add tag” feature in OneDrive, if you want your photo metadata to remain consistent. Any tags added to photos using OneDrive do not get added to the metadata of the photos. You end up with a tag list displayed by OneDrive that does not reflect the tag list contained in the photo metadata.

As of October 2015, this has now seems to have been fixed. Tags added in OneDrive will now get synced back to your photo metadata.

The background of the Desktop screen on my Windows PCs is generally set to display landscape themes. There’s a whole range of them, and other themes, available to download and use.

Today, I noticed from a Microsoft blog, that there is now a landscape theme devoted to pictures from my birthplace, the Isle of Man. Taken by Mark Wallace, there are some suitably moody shots of Peel Castle, the ruins of St. Trinian’s church, the Calf of Man and more.

They’ve been installed and serve as a reminder of my original home.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the tools I use to manage my collection of photos and the metadata contained in them.

In it, I noted that interoperability issues between metadata editing tools was a problem. Never was a truer word spoken (or written).

One of the complaints I have had for a long while about Microsoft’s Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) is that, in my experience, it corrupts the Makernotes metadata in images produced by my Canon cameras. That led to an interesting discussion in the comments of that blog post with Mike Lee. He said that he wasn’t seeing the metadata corruption when he used WPG. We established that we were both using the same version of WPG (build 16.4.3508.205), so then we had a mystery: why was I seeing metadata corruption, and he wasn’t? A further surprise was when he said that a sample file that I had uploaded to SkyDrive to share with him contained metadata errors, whereas I was positive that it was error-free.

So I set out to investigate. I took a photo using my Canon EOS 450D camera, and copied it onto my Desktop PC. This original file has the name IMG_7383.jpg:

Using Mike’s MetadataMirror tool (which uses Phil Harvey’s most excellent ExifTool under the covers), I obtained a listing of all the metadata present in this original file. As expected, the only metadata present in the file (other than the Windows metadata) is the Exif data inserted by the camera itself. This is in three groups: standard Exif, Canon Makernotes and Canon Composite tags. Here’s a link to the file (IMG_7383.txt) containing the metadata listing:

http://sdrv.ms/1aVOMkn

The next step was to use Photo Supreme (PSU) on a copy of the image (IMG_7383 – PSU.jpg) to stamp in my usual boilerplate of metadata: e.g. my name and copyright information. The  file (IMG_7383 – PSU.txt) listing the metadata resulting from using PSU on this image file is here:

http://sdrv.ms/1a16hx6

PSU has preserved the original metadata, while adding some new items. This new metadata is both XMP-based and IPTC-IIM (for backwards compatibility). PSU also writes XMP equivalents for many of the original Exif items. So for example, if you look in the file, you will see items such as:

[EXIF] Make: Canon
[EXIF] Model: Canon EOS 450D
[EXIF] Orientation: Horizontal (normal)
[EXIF] XResolution: 72
[EXIF] YResolution: 72
[EXIF] ResolutionUnit: inches
[EXIF] ModifyDate: 2013:10:04 21:06:31
[EXIF] YCbCrPositioning: Co-sited

PSU creates XMP equivalents:

[XMP] Make: Canon
[XMP] Model: Canon EOS 450D
[XMP] Orientation: Horizontal (normal)
[XMP] XResolution: 72
[XMP] YResolution: 72
[XMP] ResolutionUnit: inches
[XMP] DateTime: 2013:10:04 21:06:31.300+02:00
[XMP] YCbCrPositioning: Co-sited

PSU also adds in the boilerplate that I use in XMP, e.g.:

[XMP] Title: IMG_7383 – PSU
[XMP] Rights: 2013 Geoff Coupe, Creative Commons
[XMP] Creator: Geoff Coupe
[XMP] CreatorWorkURL: https://gcoupe.wordpress.com
[XMP] UsageTerms: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike

It also includes a notification that it has been used to edit the file, together with a timestamp. This is all as it should be, according to metadata standards.

[XMP] CreatorTool: IDimagerSU (1.9.5.170)
[XMP] MetadataDate: 2013:10:05 10:03:31.353+02:00

In summary, there is absolutely nothing untoward about the resulting image file, as far as I can see. The structure of the Exif metadata is preserved, and XMP-based metadata has been added correctly.

The next step was to take a copy of this file and add one item of metadata using WPG. This file is IMG_7383 – PSU+WPG.jpg and the corresponding file listing the metadata is IMG_7383 – PSU+WPG.txt:

http://sdrv.ms/16pxkoF

Immediately, you can see there’s a problem – errors are being reported:

[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Possibly incorrect maker notes offsets (fix by 4476?)
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonCameraSettings data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonShotInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonFileInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Suspicious MakerNotes offset for DustRemovalData
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CustomFunctions2 data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid ProcessingInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid MeasuredColor data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid SensorInfo data

And indeed, whole chunks of the Canon Makernotes are missing from the image file (left is the metadata in IMG-7383 – PSU.jpg and right is that in IMG_7383 – PSU+WPG.jpg):

There are also two other possibly significant things about this image file, captured in the metadata. The first is that when WPG writes back to the image file, it reverses the byte order of the Exif data structure. Originally, the Exif is in Little-endian order as shown in this line from both the original IMG_7383.txt and the IMG_7383 – PSU.txt files:

[File] ExifByteOrder: Little-endian (Intel, II)

However, once WPG has changed the file, the byte order is now Big-endian:

[File] ExifByteOrder: Big-endian (Motorola, MM)

Now, this may, or may not, be a problem, but it is definitely contrary to the advice given by the Metadata Working Group, which states that byte order should be preserved by tools that operate on image files.

Secondly, WPG introduces an offset in the Exif data structure when adding the changed metadata:

EXIF] Padding: (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)
[EXIF] OffsetSchema: 4476
[EXIF] XPAuthor: Geoff Coupe 2
[EXIF] Padding: (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)

So, at this point in the saga, I believe that I’ve established that for any given image that contains Canon Makernotes data, using PSU followed by WPG to edit metadata will result in the corruption of the Makernotes data. This is repeatable for all such image files that I’ve tested.

What happens if I use WPG followed by PSU to edit metadata? Let’s find out. 

I used WPG to add myself as author to a copy of the original image: IMG_7383 WPG.jpg. The metadata listing (IMG_7383 WPG.txt) is here:

http://sdrv.ms/1e16G6W

You’ll notice immediately that ExifTool gives a warning about the Makernotes structure:

[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Adjusted MakerNotes base by 4176

Also, the byte order has been changed, and padding introduced:

[File] ExifByteOrder: Big-endian (Motorola, MM)

[EXIF] Padding: (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)
[EXIF] OffsetSchema: 4176
[EXIF] XPAuthor: Geoff Coupe
[EXIF] Padding: (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)

However, there is no Makernotes corruption.

Now let us use PSU to edit the metadata in this file (I changed the Title to read IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU). The resulting image file is IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU.jpg and the corresponding listing of the metadata is IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU.txt, and can be found here:

http://sdrv.ms/GEzvu1

The interesting thing here is that the byte order has been switched back to Little-endian, and the padding removed:

Other than that, the metadata looks fine; no Makernotes are missing, and ExifTool reports no errors.

So far, so good, but now if I go back and use WPG once more, I get Makernotes corruption again. The image file is IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU+WPG.jpg and the metadata listing is IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU+WPG.txt:

http://sdrv.ms/192O5V7

The byte order has been switched again, padding introduced, and ExifTool reports:

[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Possibly incorrect maker notes offsets (fix by 4428?)
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonCameraSettings data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonShotInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonFileInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Suspicious MakerNotes offset for DustRemovalData
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CustomFunctions2 data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid ProcessingInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid MeasuredColor data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid SensorInfo data

And once again, chunks of Makernotes have gone:

So it seems that using PSU first, followed by WPG, will trigger a corruption of Canon Makernotes; however, using WPG followed by PSU does not.

But there is one more twist to this saga.

Remember that Mike had said that a sample file that I had uploaded to SkyDrive to share with him contained metadata errors, whereas I was positive that it was error-free?

I know that the image files IMG_7383 – PSU.jpg and IMG_7383 – WPG+PSU.jpg do not contain errors. I have the metadata listings to prove it. And yet, if you download these files from SkyDrive, you will find that the Makernotes have also been corrupted. By comparison, if you download the same files from this set on Flickr, you’ll find that they are error-free.

What’s going on here? I can only surmise that SkyDrive is doing some metadata processing on the images stored on the service, and that a similar, or the same, code library has the processing fault that triggers the Makernotes corruption on images that have already been processed by PSU.

The SkyDrive folder containing these test images and their metadata files is here.

The Flickr set containing the same test images is here.

I like both PSU and WPG, but using them together can be dangerous.

Addendum 7 October 2013

I’ve been doing some further investigation and established the following

• WPG definitely doesn’t like something about the metadata structures that PSU creates
• None of my other metadata tools complain about PSU
• ExifTool shows nothing amiss with the metadata that PSU creates.

I can have an image file that has had metadata edited by a whole series of tools, but if at any point I have used PSU followed at some point further down the chain by WPG, then WPG will corrupt my Makernotes metadata.

For example, I created two examples of chained metadata operations on files. The first was the sequence: Geosetter, XnViewMP, Lightroom 5, and WPG. At each stage I added a keyword identifying which tool I was using. The final result is given in the metadata listing: IMG_7383 – G+X+LR+WPG.txt, and there’s no corruption; here’s the start of the listing (but note the final offset, and the reversed byte order):

[ExifTool] ExifToolVersion: 9.35
[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Adjusted MakerNotes base by 4236
[File] FileName: IMG_7383 – G+X+LR+WPG.JPG
[File] Directory: F:/Users/Geoff/Pictures/2013/2013-10/2013-10-07
[File] FileSize: 3.9 MB
[File] FileModifyDate: 2013:10:07 18:10:04+02:00
[File] FileAccessDate: 2013:10:07 18:10:03+02:00
[File] FileCreateDate: 2013:10:07 18:09:27+02:00
[File] FilePermissions: rw-rw-rw-
[File] FileType: JPEG
[File] MIMEType: image/jpeg
[File] ExifByteOrder: Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
[File] CurrentIPTCDigest: f042c8560b6fafea9c47a1c0249baec1
[File] ImageWidth: 4272

The second was the sequence: PSU, Geosetter, XnViewMP, Lightroom 5, and WPG. Again, at each stage I added a keyword identifying which tool I was using. At each step, the metadata was as expected. Then in the last step, WPG is used to add another keyword, and bang – corruption occurs . The final result is given in the metadata listing: IMG_7383 – PSU+G+X+LR+WPG.txt. Here, WPG will corrupt the Makernotes metadata; here’s the start of the listing:

[ExifTool] ExifToolVersion: 9.35
[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Possibly incorrect maker notes offsets (fix by 4526?)
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonCameraSettings data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonShotInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CanonFileInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: [minor] Suspicious MakerNotes offset for DustRemovalData
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid CustomFunctions2 data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid ProcessingInfo data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid MeasuredColor data
[ExifTool] Warning: Invalid SensorInfo data
[File] FileName: IMG_7383 – PSU+G+X+LR+WPG.JPG
[File] Directory: F:/Users/Geoff/Pictures/2013/2013-10/2013-10-07
[File] FileSize: 3.9 MB
[File] FileModifyDate: 2013:10:07 18:25:07+02:00
[File] FileAccessDate: 2013:10:07 18:25:07+02:00
[File] FileCreateDate: 2013:10:07 18:24:37+02:00
[File] FilePermissions: rw-rw-rw-
[File] FileType: JPEG
[File] MIMEType: image/jpeg
[File] ExifByteOrder: Big-endian (Motorola, MM)

WPG is sniffing out something that PSU puts in a file, and throws a fit… I’ve asked the developer of PSU for help, but he can’t guess what WPG chokes on. Right now, without input from Microsoft, it’s all guesswork and that could take forever.

Microsoft were informed about this a couple of years ago, but since acknowledging that there was an issue, there’s been complete silence. 

Long-time readers of the blog know that one of the topics I return to every now and then is that of photography.

A couple of days ago, one of my posts had the following comment and question from michaelfanous:

I recently started trying to organize my photo albums, which are stored across several external devices. (Trying to organize over 50,000 photos). I am not a professional photographer by any means. However, I am the “family/event” historian so to speak, so I love documenting and taking pictures of everything. I wanted to know your thoughts are current software out there? Lightroom 5, Photo Gallery (Windows), ACDSee, Picasa 3.9.

My main concern is that all these files will eventually be stored in 1 central location, and the family can access them at their own over the network. However, I want to make sure that all the tagging is accessible across platforms. i.e. No matter which hardware device, or which software, when a user looks at the picture, they can see the tags.

I remember in the earlier years (which is what caused me to stop for a bit) I would tag something in Windows Photo Gallery or in Picasa, but the tags wouldn’t transfer over appropriately. I am not so much concerned with actually editing the individual pictures (I am sure that will come later once I am organized)

The other requirement is that the metadata is stored in the actual file, and not in some random database. The last thing I need is for that external database to get corrupted and lose out all the information.

Suggestions?

That sounds like a good opportunity to try and sum up what I might propose given the current state of things.

First, a recap of my groundrule for managing photo collections (which echoes what Michael has stated as a requirement):

I insist that any software used in the digital workflow (transfer from camera to computer, image selection, digital processing, cataloguing, publishing and asset management) will respect any Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata that may be stored in the image file itself.

I am not interested in asset management software that stores image metadata away in a proprietary format in the software itself. That way lies painting oneself into a corner down the road… However, I will accept asset management software that copies metadata from image files into its own database for performance reasons, so long as the database and the image files metadata content are kept in sync transparently (i.e. it takes little or no effort on my part).

The challenge is that different software treats image metadata in different ways, and interoperability can seem more of a goal than actuality. Not all image management applications will work together, and often, only a subset of all possible image metadata can be successfully exchanged between applications. Add to that the fact that many of the new photo editor applications for smartphones and tablets ignore image metadata altogether, or, even worse, strip it out. The same goes for many online social networks.

Over the last seven years, I’ve used a number of image management applications to organise and tag my photos. These include versions of:

• IDimager’s Photo Supreme
• Google’s Picasa
• Microsoft’s Windows Photo Gallery
• Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements (versions 3 and 4)
• Adobe’s Lightroom
• GeoSetter
• Microsoft’s ProPhoto Tools
• XnView/XnViewMP

I’ve also used tools that are no longer available. These include:

• Microsoft’s Expression Media and Digital Image Suite
• IDimager 5
• Picajet
• PixVue

My primary image management tool at the moment is Photo Supreme. That’s because (for me) it has the best support for handling metadata and for image management of all the tools that I’ve used. I use GeoSetter in conjunction with Photo Supreme for handling geotagging.

[Addendum: Version 2 of Photo Supreme now supports geotagging directly, and does it very well, so I no longer need to use GeoSetter in conjunction with Photo Supreme]

Adobe’s Lightroom would rate high with me if I used Raw format in my images, because it has better digital darkroom features for processing Raw images than those of Photo Supreme. However, as I don’t often use Raw format, I prefer Photo Supreme’s metadata handling, which I consider to be much superior to Lightroom’s. Photo Supreme’s features for image acquisition and selection/culling are also, for my purposes, as good as anything that Lightroom has to offer.

Since I use the ecosystem of Windows, I also have Windows Photo Gallery installed on our PCs. It’s an easy to use tool for browsing our photo collection, but I don’t use it as my primary tool for editing metadata or images. First, because while the metadata tools are usable, they are basic. However, more importantly for me, Windows Photo Gallery has a nasty habit of corrupting the Makernotes that our Canon cameras insert in the Exif section of images. This is a long standing issue that Microsoft has acknowledged and known about for some years, but clearly something that they won’t devote resources to for fixing. Microsoft seems to be using the same code in the Photos App of Windows 8, because it too will corrupt Canon Makernotes in any image that it edits. Now, I acknowledge that the majority of people either don’t know about the issue or wouldn’t bother themselves about it if they did. However, I would suggest that to a serious photographer, preservation of the original file is of paramount importance. This bug of Microsoft means that even adding a single piece of metadata to an image file will corrupt your Makernotes. That’s why I only ever use Windows Photo Gallery in a read-only mode. Anything else and it’s goodbye to your precious image data.

And don’t think that Picasa is any better in this respect. Picasa will strip out Makernotes from your image files entirely.

The bottom line: if you’re serious about photography, avoid using either Windows Photo Gallery or Picasa to do metadata work on your images. You can certainly use them to edit the images of copies of your original files, just don’t ever let them get near to your originals.

The other tools in my first list above also offer metadata handling features, but they are pretty basic, and only cover the bare minimum of the Exif and IPTC metadata standards.

One area where Photo Supreme (and Lightroom for that matter) is lagging is that of being able to handle automatic face recognition used to add metadata relating to people. Both Picasa and Windows Photo Gallery now offer this. Unfortunately, they do not use the same standard for storing people tags, so they do not interoperate. Photo Gallery uses a standard defined by Microsoft itself, whilst Picasa (in the latest version) uses a standard defined by a cross-industry consortium – the Metadata Working Group. Ironically, both Microsoft and Adobe are founder members of this consortium, yet Windows Photo Gallery and Lightroom do not yet use the consortium’s metadata standard for people tags.

The Microsoft and MWG standards allow for metadata to be applied to specific regions in the image, that is, individual faces can be marked up with the names of the people depicted in the image. There is a third competing standard used for people tags, and that is contained in the IPTC Extension standard, which contains an element used to define persons shown in an image. However, this metadata element refers to the image as a whole, so for a group photograph, for example, you can list the names of all the people shown in the photo, but not explicitly identify who is who in the image. I am aware of just one application that implements this IPTC standard for people tags: Daminion, but there may be others. Correction: I completely forgot that since Photo Supreme implements all the IPTC standards fully (Core, Extension and Plus), then it too also implements the IPTC people tag. Photo Supreme also has its own proprietary standard for manually tagging regions in images for face tags, but I don’t use it. Photo Supreme now supports the MWG Region metadata, which means that it can identify face regions that have been tagged in Picasa. It also recognises the Microsoft People Tag, but any face regions that are defined in Photo Supreme will be written out using the MWG standard, rather than the proprietary Microsoft standard.

So, to sum up at this stage: it’s possible to use a small number of different tools that will interoperate using a minimum subset of metadata standards – a basic set of Exif and IPTC Core metadata standards. That will give you a starter set of metadata elements. See this blog post for the list of IPTC elements that I use. The Exif elements are the technical data provided by the cameras I use (e.g. camera model, shutter speed, ISO, lens, date taken) plus optional GPS latitude/longitude/altitude data.

Anything beyond this, e.g. People Tags, and you are likely to run into interoperability issues.

Even with this subset, there can be bumps in the road. For example, Picasa uses the “Description” metadata field from the IPTC Core standard to display the caption for a photo, while Windows Photo Gallery uses the “Title” metadata field from the IPTC Core standard to display the caption. Even more bizarre, Windows itself (in Windows Explorer)uses “Title” according to the IPTC Core definition, and uses “Subject” to align with the IPTC Core definition of “Description”. So Windows is better aligned with the IPTC standard for photo metadata than Windows Photo Gallery…

And the icing on the cake is that both Windows Photo Gallery and Picasa will damage your files if you use either of them to edit images. Bottom line: if you use either of these tools use them in read-only mode, or use copies of your original files.

Right, you’ve now got your tools to hand, and you’ve used them to add your metadata to your images. You’ve also used your tools to tweak the original images and produced copies that have all your improvements applied: cropping, colour balance and so on. Now you want to share them with other people. What are your options?

Assuming that at least some of the people you want to share with are physically located outside of your home, then you are looking at either using one of the online Social Networks or exposing your photo collection held on your home network to (selected) people via the internet.

Let’s look at the Social Networks route first. As I’ve already said, Social Networks are not the best at preserving the metadata that you’ve spent blood, sweat and tears adding to your photos. There are also quirks involved. I use both Flickr and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, so I’ll use those to illustrate some of the oddities.

Flickr has the advantage that when you upload your photos from your local storage, the metadata in your photos gets read by Flickr. So you can search your (and other people’s) collection of photos using keywords held in metadata. Even better, if you download the original size of a photo held on Flickr, then the metadata contained within it is preserved. However, if you select to download a different-sized copy of the original photo, then Flickr will strip out the metadata. It used to be the case that even different-sized copies of the original would have the metadata of the original preserved within them. But somewhere along the line, Flickr changed the rules of their playground and made their service the poorer as a result.

Microsoft’s SkyDrive also has its faults. It does preserve metadata in downloaded copies of the originals held on its service. However, the metadata is neither exposed in the user interface, nor searchable with one exception – that of Microsoft’s proprietary People Tags. Frankly, this is abysmal. It makes sharing of photo collections with other people needlessly difficult.

There are many other Social Networks available, e.g. FaceBook, Google+, but I don’t use them, so I can’t document the inevitable issues that they will have. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

There is also the route of exposing your photo collection held on your home network to (selected) people via the internet. I use Microsoft’s Windows Home Server 2011 on our home network to store all our media for sharing to a variety of networked devices, and to back up our attached PCs. It is very good at that. It is also possible to use WHS 2011 to allow selected people to access its media collection via the internet. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, the software is riddled with problems. I cannot use it, and Microsoft has no intention of fixing it.

I see that Michael has a Synology device that he will use as a centralised nework attached storage device. It also has the feature of being able to give access to selected people over the internet. It runs a media application called Photo Station. I have no working knowledge of Synology devices or Photo Station, but I’ll just add a couple of comments. First, I noticed from the Synology documentation that Photo Station claims to:

• Search photos with keywords, time slots, or tags
• Supports people tags from Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Supports IPTC tags of photos

Nice to see IPTC tags explicitly mentioned, but I hope that these are at least the XMP-based IPTC Core set of tags, and not the legacy IPTC-IIM tags. If it is only the latter, then interoperability issues will arise sooner or later.

As I’ve already written, the People tags in Windows (Live) Photo Gallery are Microsoft-proprietary. Also, if you make a conscious decision to use them, be aware that you can kiss goodbye to your Makernotes if you use Canon cameras (and possibly other makes of cameras as well).

Secondly, Microsoft has also set a snake in the grass for Networked Attached Storage devices. The Windows indexing service is designed to collate results from network-attached Windows devices. It won’t collate results from NAS devices that don’t run a Windows operating system.

The new generation of Microsoft Apps for Windows 8 (e.g. Xbox Music, Photos, Videos) cannot access media stored on non-Windows NAS devices, even if the media locations are stored in your Windows Libraries on the accessing PC.

This is just something to be aware of going forward. The current generation of Desktop Applications (both Microsoft and third party) are generally OK. However, the new generation of Windows 8 Metro Apps, especially those from Microsoft itself, may present problems. Check them out before buying.

I’ve already said that I have been unimpressed by the first wave of photo editors designed for Metro. The situation is not improving. In the process of writing this blog entry, I thought I’d check the Windows Store to see if there were Metro Apps available for editing photo metadata. I tried two that I found:

• Photo TagEd
• Photo Metadata

Now, admittedly I have over 50,000 photos in my photo library collection. However, neither of them could open the collection without crashing. I sent an email to Photo TagEd’s support. Their response:

Sorry, we didn’t test for thousands photos by our environment.

And we can’t recommend to this App to your problem.

We have no plans to continue support for this App, because technical difficulties by Windows 8 App SDK.

Once again, We’re sorry. You can find out other apps for your Tablet PC in Windows Store.

From IV Type Team.

Sigh.

Addendum: Prompted by a discussion in the comments on this post, I’ve put up a new post that documents the corruption of Makernotes by Windows Photo Gallery:

Photo Metadata Tools – The Saga Continues

Yesterday, Microsoft added some functions to SkyDrive – its online storage service. The additions are described in this blog post by Omar Shahine, a Group Program Manager at  SkyDrive.

Now, some of the additions are worthwhile, but I am still missing something that Microsoft removed back in June 2011: the display and searching of Descriptive Tags (aka Keywords) in photos. Up until that time, you could show the Descriptive Tags that were contained in the metadata of photos uploaded to SkyDrive. Then, Microsoft did a major revamp of the user interface of SkyDrive, and started using HTML5 to drive the interface. In that revamp, something odd happened. Photos that I knew contained Descriptive Tags were suddenly shown as having no Tags, and I was being invited to re-enter Tags into the photos on SkyDrive.

Here’s an example of what I started seeing at the time; this is a screenshot of photos on my PC being displayed in Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery (now renamed to Photo Gallery), an application running on my PC. One thumbnail has been selected, and you can see the metadata embedded in the photo being displayed in the information panel on the right hand side of Windows Live Photo Gallery (click on the image to see the full-size screenshot):

You can see that the metadata contains both descriptive tags (e.g. carriage and harness horses) as well as technical and copyright information (e.g. date taken, location, camera details, etc.).

This picture was uploaded to a SkyDrive photo album here. When I looked at the picture in SkyDrive, while I saw some (but not all) of the technical information, none of the descriptive tags had been transferred. Indeed, I was invited to add the tags again!

I blogged about this backwards step in November 2011, and had responses from Omar Shahine, and others, to my post. It turned out that the “Tags” label in SkyDrive no longer referred to Descriptive Tags, but People Tags.

I notice that since then, Microsoft has renamed the “Tags” label to “People Tags” – here’s the photo being displayed in SkyDrive today:

However, there is still no sign of any Descriptive Tags being displayed by SkyDrive, even though my photos are all tagged. Yesterday, Omar Shahine and Mona Akmal of the SkyDrive team held an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. Someone asked about support of tagging on SkyDrive, to which Shahine replied:

Something we’ve talked a lot about on the team, but have nothing to share about this now.

So it’s something that has probably been talked about for the past two years, and we are still apparently no further forward? I have to say that I’m not impressed. If the team are serious about making SkyDrive relevant to photographers, then proper support of tags should be high on their to-do list.

And by “proper support”, I mean that SkyDrive should not just display Descriptive Tags as well as People Tags, but support searching of both types. Currently, they do neither.

I have a test image with a “People Tag” defined. Here it is being displayed in Windows Photo Gallery:

You can see that I have identified the face in the screenshot as being that of British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and that the image has a Descriptive Tag of “Screenshot”.

Now here’s the same image being displayed in SkyDrive:

It has lost all evidence of having a Descriptive Tag contained within the image, but at least it is displaying the fact that it has a People Tag, with the content “Melvyn Bragg”. Unfortunately, People Tags, just like Descriptive Tags, are not searchable on SkyDrive. If I search within my SkyDrive files for “Melvyn”, I get the message that nothing is found:

Both People Tags and Descriptive Tags are searchable on my PC – Windows supports searching within photo metadata, so here, the image is found:

But this won’t help someone trying to find something that has been tagged within my public SkyDrive folders, or friends and family looking for something within my shared folders.

So, to summarise:

• Microsoft removed the display of Descriptive Tags in photo metadata from SkyDrive in June 2011.
• They replaced it with the display of People Tags in photo metadata.
• Neither Descriptive Tags nor People Tags are searchable in SkyDrive
• Two years on, and nothing has changed.

Serious photographers need to look elsewhere.

Update 19th February 2014: Well, today Microsoft has changed the name of SkyDrive to OneDrive, but nothing else has changed. Tag support is still woeful, and searching of tags is still not supported.

Update 10th May 2014: Microsoft has introduced some new features into OneDrive, but unfortunately, the support for Tags is still very much broken.

Update 23rd January 2015: OneDrive has finally introduced support for searching on Tags!

One of my hobbies is photography, and my main tool for managing my digital photos is IDimager. I’ve been using it since January 2007. It’s now up to version 5, and I’ve been very happy with it. I occasionally visit the IDimager support forums, just to see if there are any announcements, or tips and tricks being posted. Yesterday I read a message from the developer that said:

IDimager V5 is discontinued as of today. Photo Supreme is a different product when compared to IDimager V5. They don’t offer an identical feature set so I recommend all IDimager V5 users to first try Supreme to see if it fits their need before they decide to make the switch.

My immediate reaction was WTF? Whilst I had been aware of the Photo Supreme product, last time I looked, a few months ago, it was for the Mac, and there was no whisper of a Windows version being made available. Fast forward a couple of months, and now it has killed off IDimager. Needless to say, I’m not very happy about this, and neither are a lot of other IDimager customers. IDimager is a serious Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool, and Photo Supreme, at first glance, has far less functionality; so for many people, Photo Supreme is nowhere near an acceptable replacement. A typical reaction:

Well that’s a real shame because you have killed off one of the best DAM systems a working professional could ask for and replaced it with a toy. I wish you luck with Photo Supreme, but regrettably it’s not a professional standard product IMO.

Because I tend to work mostly with JPG images, I’ll probably be able to carry on using IDimager for some time to come. However, for professional photographers who work with RAW format images, then IDimager will soon not be able to handle images produced by new camera models. These people have been thrown into a pit. I can only echo what someone else posted:

I have always had a lot of respect for Hert [the chief developer] and his responsiveness to bugs and feature requests. It made IDI stand out in a market dominated by big software giants who bought, crippled then abandoned software. Sadly yesterday’s announcement felt all too familiar and not what I have come to expect.

Since I have never used all of IDimager’s power (similar to most people only ever using a fraction of the capabilities of Microsoft Word), I’m taking a look at Photo Supreme to see it is a possible replacement for my usage patterns. But I’m doing so with a rather sour taste in my mouth at the moment.

Addendum 18th September 2014: I thought it was worthwhile adding that since writing this post, I switched (a while ago now) across to Photo Supreme, and have not regretted doing so. PSU has continued to evolve (version 3 is about to be released), and it has matured into a very good DAM.

Photo Supreme V3 is worth looking at.

As I wrote in my last post, Microsoft has recently released a new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, now simply known as “Photo Gallery”. That last post documented an issue that Photo Gallery has over its handling of geotags. In this post I want to look at what I would consider to be missed opportunities by Microsoft to set the lead in the field of software aimed at organising digital photos.

Microsoft is a founding member of the Metadata Working Group, a consortium of leading companies in the digital media industry, focused on the following goals:

• Preservation and seamless interoperability of digital image metadata
• Interoperability and availability to all applications, devices, and services

Almost two years ago, in November 2010, the group published version 2 of its Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata. As I wrote at the time, it’s “a major new version of the Guidelines”. The document states:

This expanded specification builds on existing metadata standards to describe several emerging consumer properties that:

• Use regions to record faces, focus points, barcodes, or other data in an image
• Provide hierarchical keywords to richly describe and classify images
• Flexibly identify an image as part of a greater media collection

While software applications are supporting features such as people tags and hierarchical keywords, they use differing implementations, so that interoperability between applications is difficult, if not often impossible.

Version 2 of the Guidelines was an attempt to define a common specification in these areas, to drive interoperability forward.

What I find disappointing is that, nearly two years later, the new version of Photo Gallery has not implemented any of these proposed specifications, and continues with the old Microsoft-proprietary ways of doing things, despite the fact that Microsoft is a founding member of the Metadata Working Group.

Still, the same charge can also be levelled at Adobe, another founding member. Their latest version of Lightroom, Lightroom 4, also continues with the Adobe-proprietary ways of doing things. The result? You can forget about any real interoperability between Photo Gallery and Lightroom when it comes to People Tags and Hierarchical Keywords.

One last, rather ironic, point. Despite the fact that Google is not a member of the Metadata Working Group, I’m heartened to see that Google has actually implemented the version 2 Guidelines proposed standard for People Tags in version 3.9 of Picasa. So it can be done. C’mon Microsoft and Adobe, get with the programme, give us tools that actually talk to each other…