Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Tag: Metadata

  • Yet More Problems With The Media Library in WHS 2011

    A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some of the errors and design issues I was seeing when using the Media Library within Windows Home Server 2011. Since then, another issue has made itself known, and I’ve had yet another facepalm moment whilst contemplating the shortcomings of WHS 2011.

    This time, it’s a metadata issue in the Music Library section.

    There are two types of metadata stored in the Music Library section of WHS 2011. The first is metadata stored as Tags in the audio files (the tracks) themselves. Examples of Tags are:

    • Track title
    • Track Artist
    • Album
    • Date Album released
    • Genre
    • Album Art (e.g. the cover of the CD or LP)

    In both Windows 7 and WHS 2011, the Album Art is also stored as an image file in JPEG format alongside the audio files in each directory folder containing the collection of tracks making up an Album. By convention, the Album Art is stored as a file called folder.jpg. These JPEG files are the second form of metadata used in the Music Library. The Windows Media Player application will also automatically generate additional JPEG files holding copies of the Album Art at different resolutions. These all have names of the form AlbumArt_{alphanumeric}_Large.jpg, AlbumArt_{alphanumeric}_Small.jpg, and AlbumArtSmall.jpg. The “Large” files contain Album Art with a resolution of 200 x 200 pixels, while the “Small” files have Album Art at a resolution of 75 x 75 pixels.

    The issue is that there is a scheduled process running in the background in WHS 2011 that goes around generating metadata for the Music Library, and it is doing two things:

    • As well as generating the additional JPEG files in each Album folder, it is also overwriting the original folder.jpg files with a version of the Album Art having a fixed resolution of 200 x 200 pixels.
    • In some cases, it is also appears to be writing incorrect Tag metadata into the audio files themselves.

    This is unwanted and unwelcome behaviour. Many of us have spent hours ensuring that our music metadata is accurate, complete with high-resolution Album Art. To have WHS 2011 come along, and without so much as a by-your-leave, destroy hours of work is simply a disaster.

    Those of us who are using Windows Media Center to access our Music Libraries on WHS 2011 have deliberately created high-resolution versions of Album Art. As one exasperated user writes:

    Seriously Microsoft. On what planet is 200×200 an acceptable resolution for cover art? Are we back in the 1980s or something? Windows Media Center is displaying the image on a 1080p display, which is pretty much the norm these days, and the 200×200 image stretched looks absolutely ratshit.

    Quite.

    I have at least got a workaround for the Album Art issue. I store high-resolution versions of the Album Art as Tags directly into the audio files themselves. I have found that Windows Media Center does seem to have the sense to use these embedded Album Art tags, rather than the low-resolution versions of the folder.jpg files written by WHS 2011. However, you have to have the Album Art tags in place first, before Windows Media Center adds the album to its library, otherwise it will take the low resolution folder.jpg file instead, and once it has that, it’s not a simple job to wipe it out.

    The fact that WHS 2011 can also apparently write incorrect Tag metadata into audio files is particularly worrying. I have found seven albums (out of about 900) in my collection where this seems to have occurred. The albums’ files have been modified since being placed on the server – and I haven’t modified them, so I can only conclude that it was something in WHS 2011 running as a scheduled process. This is absolutely not acceptable behaviour, and we need to find a workaround, or for Microsoft to come up with a fix, quickly.

    Update 5 August 2011: Well, at long last, it seems that Microsoft have responded to the pleas over this mangling of metadata. Today, they finally acknowledged that a workaround that was first posted on the Microsoft Connect web site on the 20th June would in fact stop this behaviour.

    Perhaps they were embarrassed by the evident frustration of a user called wiseadam1 who posted this scream on the 1st August:

    This is unacceptable. Not sure if one guy in MS has been the same three eyed mentally challenged ignoramous that thinks this feature being turned on by default in all versions of WMP since v6.4, is the best idea since sliced bread…it’s NOT!

    I don’t like your music scraper touching my tags, and I’m tired of it. I pay for your server software, and you slip one in on us in the background to start grabbing tags from WMP and the internet that only YOU seem to think are incorrect. TURN IT OFF! I understand you think you can make this music media world a better place, if you could only go in and tag it all yourself….but even when I have perfectly tagged albums, you still seem to think the one bonus track at the end is part of a japanese release with a different album art when it’s not, or you take the 500×500 perfect album art Folder.jpg and kill it to a 200×200 pixelated craptastic jpg!

    If you, or anyone there ever wondered why we all chose every other music manager rather than WMP….it’s because it’s horrible at managing music. I wish I was ignorant to the whole thing and I could just dumb it out like I guess what you think the majority are that will use WHS2011, or that use your WMP “recommended settings” will magically do for them, but I can’t. I won’t. $130 down the drain, and now that it’s down to about $50…..so I’m guessing I’m the only one that bought it.

    EPIC WHS FAIL

    Amen, brother!

    Update 16 February 2012: Microsoft have released a software update to address this issue. See this post for more information.

  • The Media Library in Windows Home Server 2011–Revisited

    A week ago, I blogged about my first impressions of using the Media Library in Windows Home Server 2011. My experience wasn’t entirely positive, as I found a couple of wrinkles when I was accessing the server via the Remote Web Access facility.

    Since then, I’ve played around with it some more, and I have to say that my earlier misgivings have not been assuaged with further use. Indeed, accessing the Media Library via Remote Web Access is not a particularly satisfying experience for me at the moment. This is, as almost to be expected, somewhat in contrast to the experience of Microsoft people such as Sean Daniel.

    Let’s take a closer look at what seem to be its shortcomings…

    When I use Remote Web Access to look at my server, after I sign in with my userid and password, I’m presented with the home screen of my WHS 2011 server. As you can see, the attached computers and shared folders are seen at once, but the view of the Media Library is still being built.

    WHS2011 46

    Now, I don’t mind waiting (a short while) for the view of the Media Library to be built, but what I do object to are messages such as this (An error has occurred on the server. Please try again later. If the error continues, view Support Information for help):

    WHS2011 36

    …or this (An unknown error occurred. Please try again later. If the problem persists, view Support Information to help resolve this issue at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=179234):

    WHS2011 49

    …or this (I have 45,125 pictures, not 2,000, and 12,513 songs, not 1,000 as is claimed here):

    WHS2011 44

    Such errors occur frequently, not rarely, and almost always when I first log on remotely. This all adds up to a bad experience, not a good one.

    But it doesn’t stop there.

    I had thought of using the media library facility via Remote Web Access to enable friends and relatives to browse through my photos. So, when I click on the “Browse Pictures” link, it seems that for 50% of the time, I get an error message, instead of a view of the Photo Folders:

    WHS2011 45

    Trying again usually will get me what I expected in the first place, a view of my photo folders:

    WHS2011 47

    Note, though, the “Loading details” message; the first time around after changes have been made to your photos, this can take some time to enumerate. After moving a few folders containing no more than a few dozen photos, I waited for 20 minutes for the index to be rebuilt and the details displayed…

    While my friends and relatives could browse through the photo folders, this is a pretty clumsy way of trying to find photos of interest. I have tagged all my photos using the IPTC Core Metadata standard. So I naturally assumed that using the “Search your pictures” box shown above I could enter photo tags and display the relevant photos.

    Wrong.

    That search box only seems to understand filename searches – and that’s simply not good enough. This limitation is all the more surprising because tags are displayed along with photos, see here for an example:

    WHS2011 43

    By the way, notice how the “Date created” field in the above screenshot is using the US format (mm/dd/yyyy), despite the fact that the format setting on my server has been set to the European format (dd/mm/yyyy). Furthermore, is this field the date the file was created, or the date the picture was taken? “Date created” is NOT necessarily the same as “Date taken” for digital pictures. Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 recognises this, and displays the “Date taken” field (see screenshot below). The Media Library in WHS 2011 is either displaying a different field or using the wrong metadata name. More inconsistency in the user experience, it would seem.

    WLPG 10

    Update 6/6/2011: I’ve just discovered that the Slideshow function in Remote Web Access is not working for me either. I get a blank screen:

    WHS2011 50

    Oddly enough, it just seems to be this particular folder. Other picture folders that I’ve checked seem OK, but not this one. I don’t think it’s related to the number of items, or the size of the photos, either individually or collectively. Other folders that have comparable numbers or sizes are working in the Slideshow view, but admittedly, I haven’t been through every single folder in the Library to check this.

    Oh, and the search function seems to fall over more often than not anyway:

    WHS2011 40

    And, even more bizarrely, while you can’t search for photo tags within the Media Library, if you switch to using Shared Folders via Remote Web Access, you can:

    WHS2011 48

    This however, has its own limitations. You’ll notice that I searched for the tag “pond”. I did this while viewing the shared folders containing my photos. However, the search has returned results from all of my shared folders… Sigh.

    Oh, and remember that I said that the Media Library would display the tags contained in photos, even if you couldn’t search on them? Well, the Shared Folders won’t display any tags in photos (there’s no equivalent of the “File properties” view in Remote Web Access), but you can search on tags… Honestly, is this experience designed, or did it just grow, like Topsy?

    So, to summarise; I’m seeing both errors and design shortcomings:

    Errors:

    • Every time I first log on to my WHS 2011 domain, I will get some sort of error from the Media Library. I need to refresh the browser, and then I will see the Media Library folders. I’m using IE9.
    • Clicking on the “Browse Pictures” link in the Media Library results in an error about 50% of the time.
    • Searching on the pictures in the Media Library frequently results in a “Request Failed” error.
    • The Slideshow function of the Pictures Library is not working.

    Design shortcomings:

    • The Search function in the Media Library only seems to search on the filename – it does not search picture tag metadata. And yet, selecting a photo will display the tag metadata.
    • The Search function in the Shared Folders does search tag metadata, yet selecting a photo in the Shared Folders view does not display tag metadata (i.e. you can’t display the properties of a file).
    • The Search function in the Shared Folders view searches across all the folders – it does not seem possible to restrict the search to a subset of folders – e.g. search only within the Picture folders.

    With these issues and shortcomings, I’m reluctant to open up access to my photo library for friends and relatives – I fear that the experience will turn them off more than encourage them to use it.

    Update: I just wanted to mention the fact that in addition to these issues, it also appears as though WHS 2011 will rummage through the Album Art and metadata of your music files – and overwrite them as it sees fit. A disaster if you’ve spent hours/days/weeks getting your Album Art and metadata the way you want it to be.

  • Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata

    The Metadata Working Group (an industry consortium including Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony) have just published the second version of their Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata.

    In their own words, it’s “a major new version of the Guidelines”.

    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

    I’ve had a quick look through it, and it looks very good. Here’s hoping that software developers start following it. At the very least, please make the developers in the companies that comprise the consortium follow it. On past performance, their record has been, shall we say, somewhat patchy up until now.

    Of particular interest is the attempt in the guidelines to set cross-industry standards for recording faces in images. At the moment, every software application does it their own way. Let the attempt to herd cats begin…

  • Tagging Digital Photos – Part III

    As a result of my last post on tagging, I’ve had a couple of questions, so I thought I’d answer them in this post. The questions were:

    1. Say I went on vacation and came back with a whole bunch of pictures. How do you relate those pictures to each other? I.e. is there a way to do some kind of “Description tree structure” effectively?
    2. I’ve seen that many users of JRiver Media Center (JRMC) use the hierarchy structure in keywords that you describe above (they usually call it nesting). In JRMC this is displayed nicely in a tree structure. How portable is this hierarchy structure? How does it display in IdImager, WPLG, or in any of the Adobe applications?

    Question 1 is a bit like a combination of “how long is a piece of string” and “what’s the best way to skin a cat?”. I can only answer it by describing what works for me, but I would not claim that it’s the most effective for everyone.

    So, here’s what I do when I get back from a vacation… First, ingest all the photos from my camera(s) into the tool that happens to be my choice for the heart of my digital workflow: IDimager. (Note: IDimager is no longer available. Its successor is Photo Supreme, which I am now using) Other folks will have their own choices such as Adobe Lightroom, or even free tools such as Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG). I’ve ended up with IDimager simply because, for me, the combination of its flexibility and power combined with a reasonable cost gives me the biggest bang for the buck of all the tools I’ve looked at.

    During the ingestion process, IDimager renames all the photos from the camera’s IMGnnnn format to my preferred date/timestamp format of yyyymmdd-hhmmss-nn, and also places the photos into a folder structure that is ordered by date to three levels: year, month and day. If a particular folder does not already exist, IDimager will create it on the fly. At the same time, the first pass of assigning metadata to every image is done by IDimager. This is to add the Contact Info, Copyright Notice, Usage Rights, and Title fields to the images.

    The next step is to cull the obvious failures from the set of images using the Light Table view of IDimager. Then I’m ready to do the first pass of assigning the detailed metadata to the working set of images. Since these are vacation photos, they will all have the Events/holidays/vacation Keyword assigned. I will also add location information, simultaneously to both the IPTC Core Location metadata fields, and as a structured Keyword; e.g. Places/Europe/Spain/Catalunya/Barcelona/Las Ramblas.

    Then I’ll do a few more passes, adding further Keyword metadata as appropriate, until I feel that sufficient metadata has been added. The last step at this stage will be to add geotag metadata, if I’ve had my GPS logger with me.

    The “Description tree structure” (a.k.a. the “Keyword” or “Tag” tree structure) that I have is as I described in the last post. It’s effective enough for me, but I won’t claim that it will work for everyone. Still, if you build up your structure following David Rieck’s suggestions, then I think you’ll have a good start. I’ve also just found a short article that gives some guidelines about how you might go about designing your own controlled vocabulary and taxonomy for digital images.

    Now I have the starter set of vacation photos. Further steps in the workflow will be to choose the best, with further processing and editing as necessary, by assigning ratings, using the “power of 10” or “pyramid” rule. This is described in Peter Krogh’s “The DAM Book” . The rule is that each additional “star” rating will have an order of magnitude fewer images in it. For example, if you have say 100,000 images in your total collection, then 10,000 might be rated with 1 star, 1,000 rated with 2 stars, 100 rated with 3 stars, and so on. Of course, at this rate, I’ll be lucky to have even a single image that is worthy of 5 stars, but that’s the idea – be aggressive to drive up your idea of quality.

    Because this starter set of vacation photos has sufficient metadata (for me), I’m able to select them quickly out of my total collection using either IDimager or WLPG. For simple queries, either will do; e.g. select vacation photos taken in 2006 in Barcelona. But for more complex queries, then I have to use IDimager; e.g. select vacation photos that show ball games but not tennis…

    There are other things that IDimager can do that less capable tools (e.g. Picasa and WLPG) simply can’t. Synonyms and relationships, for instance. Synonyms mean that if I search my image collection for cars, for example, IDimager will also suggest synonyms for the search term, e.g. automobiles. Relationships means that, for example, People/Family/John is related to People/Family/Anita as “husband to wife”.

    By creating relationships between your keywords, you are able to switch instantly to related keywords. If the keyword John is selected, you get instant access to Anita because Anita will be included in the sub list of John.

    Question 2 is somewhat difficult for me to answer, because I don’t use JRiver Media Center (JRMC). So I can’t say for certain how JRMC will expose the keyword structure to other tools. But any application has in theory two possible approaches to this. The first is a static approach, whereby you can export the structure from tool A into an intermediate file that can then be imported into tool B. The intermediate file usually takes the form of being in CSV or XML format. These two formats are pretty widely understood by a variety of Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools. Being static, it’s generally best used to set up a new tool, or to take a snapshot of your current structure, either for archiving purposes, or for sharing with other people.

    The second approach is a dynamic interchange, whereby all the DAM tools being used will track changes to the keyword structure preferably themselves, or with minimum user intervention. Because we are dealing with photos here, we do in fact have the possibility of achieving that dynamic interchange by using the photo metadata in the files. So, for example, if I make a change to the keyword structure in IDimager, I will then synchronise my image collection with the new structure. IDimager then writes out changes as necessary to the metadata of files that are affected by the change.

    WLPG monitors for changes in the metadata of images and reflects those changes in the metadata and keyword structure displayed in WLPG and held in its database. This means that both tools should show the same keyword structure. Here’s an example looking at part of the Places hierarchy with both IDimager and WLPG (click on the pictures to see the full-sized images):

    Church1 Church2

    You’ll notice that although the subtrees for the Glenfaba and Michael Sheadings (the Manx equivalent of State) are shown expanded in the IDimager screenshot, and not in the WLPG screenshot, both do have the same structure. And on the right, you can see that both have the same keywords. Also note that in IDimager, the full delimited keywords are shown (e.g. Places/Europe/Isle of Man/Middle Sheading/Baldwin, whereas in WLPG only that leaf of the full delimited keyword is shown, e.g. Baldwin.

    WLPG is reading the whole delimited keyword, and using it to recreate the keyword structure shown on the left (in this case under the Descriptive Tags heading). So in this case, IDimager and WLPG are able to share the keyword structure dynamically. I’ve been able to set it up this way, because I’m able to tell IDimager to use delimited keywords, and that the delimiter character to use is “/” (which is required by WLPG). If JRMC can write out delimited keywords into the IPTC Core metadata of your image collection using “/” as the delimiter, then WLPG should be able to reconstruct and track the keyword hierarchy on the fly.

    Be aware that not all tools use the same delimiter. For example, Lightroom always uses the pipe character ( | ) as a delimiter for its hierarchical keywords. In addition, Lightroom uses a separate XMP property to store these hierarchical keywords separated from the normal keywords. That’s why IDimager also supports the hierarchical keywords method as used by Lightroom as well as delimited keywords written to IPTC Core specs. So portability between tools is by no means guaranteed, but often a way can be found if at least one of the tools is flexible enough. Hope this helps.

  • Tagging Digital Photos – Part II

    I’ve been asked by someone for some detail on how I tag my digital photos. I thought that it might possibly be of some interest to others, so here’s the answer as a blog entry.

    The starting point is that I tag my photos using some (but by no means all) of the data elements specified by the IPTC Core standard. The following table lists the elements that I use; the descriptions that I have provided are drawn from the excellent Field Guide provided by the PhotoMetadata.org web site.

    Element Description
    Title This field is a shorthand reference for the image or “photograph” – primarily for identification. The title of an image should be a short, human-readable name – text and/or numeric reference – and may take several forms.In my case, I now use a date/timestamp to uniquely identify all my photos, i.e. a title has the form: yyyymmdd-hhss-nn.
    Description The Description field, often referred to by applications as “Caption,” should report the who, what and why of what the photograph depicts.I don’t always follow the guideline given by the Field Guide’s explanation, I usually just rely on the fact that this metadata is covered by the Keyword and Location metadata content for my image:”If there is a person or people in the image, this caption might include their names, and/or their roles in any action taking place. If the image depicts a location, then it should describe the location. Don’t forget to also include this same “geographical” information in the appropriate fields (location, city, state/province, country) of the IPTC Core. The amount of detail to include depends on the image and whether it is documentary or conceptual”.
    Keyword Terms or phrases to describe the subject of content in the photograph. I have cobbled together a controlled vocabulary (see later) for my own use here.
    Copyright Notice The Copyright Notice should include any legal language required to claim intellectual property. It should identify the photograph’s current holder(s).
    Rights Usage Terms The Rights Usage Terms field should include free-text instructions on how the photograph can be legally used. The majority of my photos are licensed under a Creative Commons license.
    Contact Info The Contact Info fields provide a generic structure for storing basic information that should make it easy to reach the person or organization that created this image.Note: “City,” “State” and “Country” used in Contact Info should not be confused with fields bearing the same names that refer to the picture’s origin.

    Address (Contact info)
    Address is a multi-line field.

    City (Contact info)
    Enter the name of the city where your business is located.

    Country (Contact info)
    Enter the name of the country where your business is located.

    Email(s) (Contact info)

    Enter your business or work email address, such as name@domain.com. Separate multiple email addresses with commas.

    Phone(s)  (Contact info)
    Enter your business or work telephone number here. Separate multiple numbers with commas. Be sure to include the complete international format of a phone number including: +{countrycode} ({regional code}) {phone number} – {extension, if required}

    Postal Code (Contact info)
    Enter the local postal code (such as ZIP code) where your business is located.

    State/Province (Contact info)
    Enter the name of the State or Province where your business is located. Since the abbreviation for a state or province may be unknown to those viewing your metadata internationally, consider spelling out the name.

    Website(s) (Contact info)
    Enter the URL or web address for your business. Separate multiple addresses with commas.

    Since I’m not a commercial photographer, I use the bare minimum here: just city, country, email and web site.
    Country
    (legacy)    		 The full name of the country pictured in the photograph. This field is at the first level of a top-down geographical hierarchy. Use a verbal name and not a code.
    State/Province
    (legacy)    		 The name of the subregion of a country – usually referred to as either a State or Province – pictured in the image. Since the abbreviation for a State or Province may be unknown to those viewing your metadata internationally, consider using the full spelling of the name. Province/State is at the second level of a top-down geographical hierarchy.
    City
    (legacy)    		 The name of the city where the image was captured. If there is no city, I use the Sublocation field alone to specify where the photograph was made. City is at the third level of a top-down geographical hierarchy.
    Sublocation
    (legacy)    		 The name of the sublocation shown in the image. This might be the name of a specific area within a city (Manhattan), or the name of a well-known place (Pyramids of Giza), monument or natural feature outside a city (Grand Canyon). Location is the most specific term, at the fourth level of a top-down geographical hierarchy.

    You’ll notice that in the above table, the location fields of ITPC Core (country, state/province, city, sublocation) are marked as legacy. That’s because there’s a newer IPTC specification (IPTC Extension) that seeks to remove the ambiguity implicit in the term “location”. After all, does it refer to the location of the camera, or the location of the subject in the picture? So the Extension defines two classes of location: the location where the image was created, and the location shown in the image itself.

    For the moment, I’m continuing to use these legacy terms from IPTC Core (and for the most part, the location of the camera and the subject are the same for all practical purposes as far as I’m concerned). At some point in the future though, I’ll probably move over to using these newer metadata items from the IPTC Extension.

    One other thing, I “echo” the content of the location metadata back to a structured Keyword entry. For example, a photo taken in the Dam Square in Amsterdam will have the following items of metadata in it:

    Sublocation: Dam Square
    City: Amsterdam
    State: Noord-Holland
    Country: Netherlands
    Keyword: Netherlands/Noord-Holland/Amsterdam/Dam Square

    This is handled automatically by the application I use in my digital workflow: IDimager. (Note: IDimager is no longer available. Its successor is Photo Supreme, which I am now using) When I tag an image with a known sublocation, then the other corresponding location metadata, as well as the structured Keyword entry are automatically written into the image. Having a structured keyword echoing the location metadata in this way helps when the images are viewed as a collection using an application that does not support IPTC location metadata, but does support IPTC keywords. Windows Live Photo Gallery, for example (but see Note 1 below).

    Keywords and Controlled Vocabularies

    Choosing the right set and structure of your keywords that are used in your image library is a big topic, so I can only scratch the surface here. I’ve borrowed ideas from a number of different sources to come up with mine.

    First of all, I followed the excellent set of guidelines that David Riecks put together on his Controlled Vocabulary web site. Then, having a flat list of thousands of keywords is not very useful, it’s much better to arrange them into a hierarchy that connects related terms together; a so-called Controlled Vocabulary. For example, my keyword cows is actually part of a hierarchy that starts Nature/Animals/livestock/cattle/dairy cattle/cows. That way, when I search for photos (using either Windows Live Photo Gallery or IDimager) with the keyword cows, it will just show me those with cows in them. But if I search for photos with the keyword livestock, it will show me photos of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and so on. When I use IDimager to tag a image of a cow with the cows keyword, it will automatically add all the parent keywords in the structure: dairy cattle, cattle, livestock, Animals, and Nature.

    My hierarchy has been built up from a number of sources:

    I’ve ended up with a structure that has the following items at the root:

    • Activities
    • Events
    • Nature
    • Objects
    • People
    • Places
    • Science
    • Styles

    Each of these splits down into further categories as necessary as you go down the levels. For example, Activities splits into

    • Disciplines
    • Hobbies
    • Physical and mental activities
    • Processes and techniques

    So then a photo of a tennis match would have the structured keyword of Activities/physical and mental activities/games/sports/ball game/tennis assigned to it.

    While setting up a controlled vocabulary takes a bit of work, and it will require ongoing “gardening”, there’s no question but that it’s useful when you have a lot of photos. I’ve currently got in excess of 37,000 photos in my collection and having them all with metadata makes it much easier to manage them.

    Note 1: Since I wrote this post, there has been a new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery released that does actually use the IPTC “Location created” metadata. It uses those fields to hold what it calls “geotags”, but which are in fact textual descriptions of the geographic location: street address, city, state/province and country.

  • Managing Metadata

    Metadata is “data about data”. While the term is used to cover a wide variety of fields, the one that most interests me is metadata used in digital images.

    The most prevalent standard for digital image metadata is Exif, implemented in every digital camera. It’s metadata focused on technical information about the picture itself: camera shutter speed, exposure, etc. The standards of IPTC-IIM and XMP are focused on metadata about the subject of the photograph: topic, location, photographer, etc. IPTC-IIM is an earlier standard that has been in use by the press agencies since the 1980s – so there’s a large installed base. However, it’s not easily extensible. Enter XMP, which is XML-based, first created by Adobe Systems Inc. in 2001. In 2004, Adobe got together with the IPTC organisation and others to create the “IPTC Core” standard, an XML-based successor to IPTC-IIM.

    Of course, as the old joke has it, “the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”. What is worse, is that different manufacturers (of cameras, application software, operating system software) interpret the standards in subtly different ways so that the resulting implementations are often incompatible with each other.

    This got to such a stage that in 2006, Microsoft proposed the setting up of a cross-industry working group to deal with the matter. As a result, the Metadata Working Group was created in 2007 by five founding members: Apple, Adobe, Canon, Microsoft and Nokia. In 2008, Sony joined the party. The goals are:

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

    Not before time, I hear you cry. Certainly I get very frustrated by the current lack of interoperability that exists.

    Yesterday, at the annual Photokina exhibition, the Metadata Working Group released version 1.0 of their Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata. In the Group’s own words, “this document describes how best to use existing standards such as Exif, IPTC, and XMP to address the key organizational metadata questions that most consumers have”.

    I’ve only had time to quickly glance through the document, but it does seem to be a good effort to attempt to herd the bunch of cats that are software developers – many of them in their own companies.

    It was with some irony that I noted this paragraph (page 32):

    Hierarchical keywords are not covered. However it’s well understood that this is an important use case even in the context of the consumer and will be added to future versions of this document. There are existing solutions available e.g. Adobe Bridge, Adobe Lightroom as well as Microsoft Expression Media and Windows Live Photo Gallery that have introduced hierarchical keyword workflows specific to their needs.

    Irony, because it’s the way that Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery has currently implemented hierarchical keywords that is causing me some interoperability problems and frustration at the moment.

    Oh well, back to herding cats…