I see that Adobe has recently released Photoshop Elements 9. I last used Photoshop Elements when it was at version 4, and stopped using it because the Organizer part of the package had too many limitations for me. I did like the features of the Photoshop Editor, but I hated the Organizer with a passion.

Still, time passes and now we’ve arrived at version 9, so I thought I’d just take it out for a test drive and downloaded the trial version.

Since the Organizer was the weak point the last time around as far as I was concerned, I fired that up first to take a look at it. I imported a subset of photos taken this year and started kicking the tyres.

The first thing I noticed was that the Organizer had successfully imported the IPTC Keyword metadata from the files and used this to create Keyword Tags. However, it did not, unlike Windows Live Photo Gallery, recognise that these were hierarchical tags and create the Keyword Tag hierarchy automatically. Take a look at this screenshot (click on the image to open a larger version in a new window):

You can see the imported Tags under the “Imported Keyword Tags” category, but notice how the Organizer has simply imported them all as a flat list – it has not grouped them into a hierarchy. Also notice how a Tag with multiple levels is too long to be displayed properly.

Now, it is possible for the Organizer to have a Keyword Tag hierarchy, you can see the start of one in the screenshot above, with the first levels being “People”, “Places”, “Events”, “Other” and the “Imported Keyword Tags”. So, having imported all my tags as a flat list, I would have to manually, and laboriously, re-create my tag hierarchy in Organizer to match the hierarchy described in my files’ metadata. This would not be a quick job…

The next question would be, having got a tag hierarchy created in Organizer, what happens when I write out Tags into files as metadata? Does it store them in a hierarchical manner?

To test that, I created a simple hierarchy under People (People/Family/Test level 1/Test level 2/Family member 1) and assigned that tag to a test image in the Organizer:

Here is a screenshot of what the Organizer tells me about the IPTC metadata of this image before I applied the tag:

You can see that there are two hierarchical Keywords already present in the file’s metadata. Here’s what the file’s metadata becomes after I tell Organizer to write out the Tags to the file:

Not good. Although the Tag “Family member 1” is in a hierarchy in the Organizer, it’s just been written out as a flat, single level, tag to the IPTC metadata.

From this I conclude that the Organizer does not support hierarchical tags in file metadata. That was the case back with version 4. It’s disappointing that it’s still this way.

One other thing I looked at with the Organizer is how well it plays in a multi-tool workflow. Like many digital photographers, I have a number of different applications that I use for different purposes. It’s extremely important that these will all play together, and do it as transparently as possible, with little or no effort on my part.

So, for example, what happens if the metadata of a file gets changed by another tool outside of Photoshop Elements 9?

I tested this by first importing some image files into the Organizer. I then added a tag to a selection of the files using another tool (IDimager). Both Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery will pick this change up and update their Tag list to reflect the new one and the files that contain it. Not the Organizer, though. It just sat there and insisted that the tags associated with the files in question were as originally imported, and nothing had changed.

I thought I’d try and reimport the files to see if Organizer would then realise that a new tag had been added. Not a bit of it – it simply insisted that it already knew about these files and did not realise that the metadata had changed:

As far as I’m concerned, this is a showstopper. The Organizer in Photoshop Elements 9 just doesn’t play at all well in a multi-tool digital workflow. It was the same back in the days of version 4. Plus ça change…

And just in case you think I’m being unnecessarily hard on the Organizer here, which is intended for ordinary mortals rather than professional photographers, just consider this… If you have a family and you have a number of computers in your household, then you had better make sure that just one computer is devoted to cataloguing your photo collection. These limitations of the Organizer mean that you can’t have Photoshop Elements installed on multiple computers, and expect the metadata and Keyword Tag hierarchies automatically synchronised between the family PCs. That is one of the plus points about Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery. I do all the heavy lifting of cataloguing and Keyword maintenance on my main computer using IDimager, and all the other computers in the household running Picasa or WLPG pick up the changes automatically. That will not be the case with Photoshop Elements. It may export the Tags as metadata, but it doesn’t export the tag hierarchy.

Oh, one other disappointing thing about the Organizer: geotagging. It uses Yahoo Maps in the geotag interface. The satellite coverage of Yahoo maps in comparison to Google or Bing Maps is but a pale shadow. For the majority of my photographs, I get a plaintive “imagery not available” message if I try to place a geotag accurately.

After all this, I haven’t had a chance to look at the editor in Photoshop Elements 9. I’m sure it will be powerful, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn… On the odd occasion when I need more capability than my usual tools give, I can always fire up the editor from Photoshop Elements 4. I see no reason to upgrade to version 9.

This is a bit of a rant. This is a bit of a rant about Microsoft software. This is a bit of a rant about Windows Live Essentials 2011.

Windows Live Essentials (WLE) is a suite of utilities from Microsoft that began life back in 2006. WLE 2011 is the fourth major iteration of the suite, and was released in its final version on 30th September 2010. It now contains a number of utilities:

• Windows Live Family Safety
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Mesh
• Windows Live Messenger
• Windows Live Messenger Companion
• Windows Live Movie Maker
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Writer

Of these eight utilities, I really only made extensive use of four of them (Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery and Writer). With the release of WLE 2011, and the acquisition of a camera that can shoot HD video in addition to photos, I had expected to start making use of Movie Maker.

Instead, I’ve found that the 2011 versions of both Movie Maker and Photo Gallery have surprising limitations that represent a step backwards from earlier versions. Worse still, Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 has a showstopper of an issue that means that I cannot use it until it is resolved in a satisfactory manner by Microsoft.

Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM) is a complete re-write of an earlier effort by Microsoft: Windows Movie Maker (WMM). Unfortunately, in the rewrite, Microsoft’s desire to make easy-to-use software has resulted in the dumbing-down of the software to the point where functionality has been removed.

Windows Movie Maker had both a “storyboard” view and a “timeline” view for editing and assembling videos. Windows Live Movie Maker 2011, on the other hand, has dropped the timeline view and only offers a storyboard view for editing. That’s a great pity, because having the timeline view makes some operations very easy to do, and they can only be done with difficulty, if at all, in the storyboard view. For example, in WMM’s timeline view, you could edit the audio of a video clip. You simply can’t do this in WLMM’s storyboard.

Limitation number two is that, as far as Microsoft is concerned, we all live in either North America or a few other places. That’s because when you produce your finished video, WLMM will produce it in the NSTC standard. Much of the world (over 120 countries and territories) uses the PAL standard, but Microsoft does not support this in WLMM by default. You can cook up your own custom settings, but this is not always straightforward. Take a look at this discussion on the WLMM Help Forum to get an idea of some of the issues involved.

One would think that since Microsoft is apparently trying to make easy-to-use software that they would offer a simple “NTSC or PAL” switch in WLMM, just as practically every other video editing software does, but no; for some reason they have concluded not to do it, leaving us to hunt for information as to how to set it up for ourselves. Two steps back…

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) has had more functionality added to it in each of the major releases. WLPG 2011, for example, now has automatic face recognition, geotagging, and a “photo fuse” feature added to it over the features that were in WLPG 2010.

However, there is at least one limitation that I’ve found in comparison with WLPG 2010, so it’s not just a simple move forward. WLPG 2010 had a slideshow function – select your photos, click on the Slideshow button, and you got an instant slideshow of your selected photos. WLPG 2011 seems to offer the same functionality, but when you click on its Slideshow button, what is actually happening is that it passes the job over to Windows Live Movie Maker 2011 to do the work of producing and running the slideshow. And here’s the limitation: the quality of the slideshow produced by WLMM 2011 is noticeably poorer than that which was produced by WLPG 2010.

When I raised this issue in the WLPG Help Forum, the first response back from Microsoft was to deny that anything had changed between WLPG 2010 and WLPG 2011. They then conceded that things had in fact been changed and that “photo quality in slide shows in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta is indeed a bit degraded when compared to the original file source”. The reason given was that “since videos have been incorporated to the feature, high definition photos in the slide show are forced to level with the resolution capacity of a video format”.

While Microsoft may think that slideshow quality has been “a bit degraded”, I see it as noticeably degraded – to the point where I consider it unacceptable in quality, and a step backwards from what was available in WLPG 2010.

And then we come to the showstopper in WLPG 2011: geotagging.

Unlike every other application I’ve seen (IDimager, Picasa, PhotoShop Elements, Lightroom, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, Geosetter) that offers geotagging either directly or via a plug-in, WLPG 2011 does not offer a map-based interface to position geotags. Instead, it uses a text-driven database to assign geotags. The problem with this, as I’ve pointed out here and here, is that this is very prone to errors of interpretation.  If Microsoft had left it at simply a textual description of a geotag, I could have lived with it. But no, they go a step further: they also write out GPS coordinates into the Exif metadata of the image. In effect, WLPG 2011 is guessing the GPS coordinates based on text contained in the contents of the IPTC metadata fields that deal with information about location. Microsoft are really doing geocoding, rather than geotagging. The problem is that very often, these guesses turn out to be wildly wrong. Even that I could live with, if WLPG 2011 had given me an option to stop it writing out these GPS coordinates into my images; but it doesn’t, and that is an unforgivable showstopper in my book. WLPG 2011 has entered false GPS data into thousands of my images.

It’s really odd, the automatic face recognition feature of WLPG 2011 asks the user to confirm its guesses as to who the person in a photo is each and every time. Yet the geotagging feature is making guesses about GPS coordinates and writing these out to image metadata without even notifying the user that it is doing this.

I, and others, have raised the issue in the WLPG Help Forum here and here. The worrying thing is that so far, while the issue has been acknowledged by Microsoft, the manner of their replies are, to my eyes at least, rather along the lines of “it’s not a bug, but a feature…” Sorry, Microsoft, it’s not a feature, it’s a disaster. One that could have easily been avoided if they had given us the option to turn off the writing of GPS coordinates into image metadata. And if they had given us a map-based interface, like any decent geotagging application, then users could have checked WLPG’s guesses, confirmed those that were correct, and rejected the false ones.

WLPG 2011, despite the fact that it uses the term “geotag” in the application, is actually doing geocoding, rather than geotagging if you follow the strict definition of the terms. There’s probably a reason that everyone else does geotagging in their applications, and that is probably because it isn’t so prone to horrible errors as Microsoft’s geocoding approach has turned out to be.

This issue makes WLPG 2011 not so much two steps back in comparison to WLPG 2010, but more of a step off the cliff…

Update 2 December 2010

There’s an update to WLPG 2011 that addresses the geotagging issue. See here for more information.

So the final version of Windows Live Essentials was released today. I see from this blog post by Chris Jones that apparently 95% of the bugs that were present in the beta version have been addressed by this final release.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would find myself continuing to be bitten by one of the remaining 5% of bugs.

Windows Live Photo Gallery still continues to write false GPS coordinates into my images.

This is unacceptable behaviour as far as I’m concerned. I can’t afford to have it running on my computers and introducing garbage into my image metadata.

Last month I wrote about the geotagging disaster that the current beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery is causing. At the moment, I daren’t have it running on my PC because it wantonly writes garbage GPS coordinates into my photos.

While I’m waiting to see what Microsoft will do in the next beta of WLPG, I thought that I’d take a look at its closest rival, Google’s Picasa, to see how that’s shaping up.

While I found on past experience that there’s lots to like about Picasa, I’d ruled it out up until now because it did not support XMP-based metadata. That meant as I use metadata following the IPTC Core standard, which itself uses XMP, then Picasa just didn’t cut it.

However, things change, and the current version of Picasa, version 3.8 released last month, is being trumpeted by Google as now supporting XMP.

So I downloaded and installed this new version of Picasa. And while it certainly seems to display XMP-based metadata (see below), it doesn’t seem to support writing out all of this metadata into image files. I also came across a major bug in how Picasa handles Geotags.

It won’t display the correct GPS coordinates of many of my files on its map. Here’s an example, the contents of a folder containing images shot in the local area here in The Netherlands (click on the image to see it full-size in a new window).

Here’s a close-up of the map. As you can see, Picasa claims that many of the images have GPS coordinates corresponding to places outside of The Netherlands, in fact many of the images are literally out of this world, according to Picasa.

These files have all had GPS coordinates added to them using IDimager. (Note: IDimager is no longer available. Its successor is Photo Supreme, which I am now using) All these files will display correctly in IDimager itself, and also in the map interfaces of Microsoft’s Pro Photo tools and Geosetter. Here are the files being displayed correctly in the map interface of Geosetter:

Clearly, this is a bug in the current version (3.8) of Picasa. Fortunately, Google have acknowledged that there is a problem, and it should get fixed at some point in the future.

As to the XMP metadata support, it looks as though the following IPTC Core elements are at least read by Picasa for JPEG files:

Description
Description Writer
Headline
Keywords
Title/ObjectName
Job ID
Instructions
City
Location
State
Country
Creator
Creator’s Job Title
Provider
Source
Copyright Notice

In this version of Picasa, there doesn’t seem to be a way of writing data into all of these fields, but only a subset, so Picasa isn’t yet suitable for maintaining IPTC Core metadata. Picasa also doesn’t read and display these metadata fields at all from RAW files (at least for my Canon CR2 format). It only appears to display the Exif metadata from these RAW files. So, once again Picasa is getting closer, but it’s not good enough for what I’m looking for.