In case you ever wondered why you should worry about your files, here is a good reason: watch this short video done by the Library of Congress (3 minutes). It will remind you how fragile it is to be “all digital”.
If you started working on computers before the turn of the millennium, there is a good chance you have had the pain and panic joy to migrate valuable files from “floppies”, “ZIP drives” and other deceased mediums to safer grounds. Read more…
Steve Jobs and Michael Dell did it. Executives are sometimes tempted to swap those worthless options (issued before the crash…) with some shiny (…newly backdated…) and lucrative ones. However, we live in the days of electronic documents: getting caught (with the hand in the cookie jar…) is a risk, because embedded file metadata can show the accurate date of a Word or PDF document! And recently, more courts consider this vital piece of information as a part of the discovery process.
You wonder what could possibly connect the Volkswagen Beetle with IPTC metadata? Evolution!
Well, I rambled got a little bit carried away during my interview with Vlad Georgescu over at OrganizedPictures.com. Truth to be told, the success story of the Beetle is a good analogy to the evolution from IPTC/IIM to XMP.
Like tinkering with metadata? Sign up for the limited private Metability FileMind beta test now!
FileMind is not yet feature complete; chances are pretty good that your very own requirements may end up as built-in functionality in the final version. All active beta testers receive a FREE license of the release version! Read more…
Adding metadata costs time, there is no doubt. However, content editing applications such as MS Office or Photoshop are not optimized for this. Its best to use a separate tool that allows you to tag your files faster and with a higher accuracy. If you are new to metadata, you may ask yourself: Why bother anyway?
Tagging images, audio and video clips may seem most obvious, since the contain little or no textual information that could be gobbled up by a search tool. Even the snazziest PCs have a hard time to do anything else besides reading text. But is it all about Rich Media files?
Don’t want to join the growing league of “keyword spammers”? If you need some inspiration about how to tag images in a meaningful way, try this excellent site:
http://imagery.gettyimages.com/getty_images_keyword_guide/usa/?isource=USA_SearchTips_keywords
Say Good-Bye, XMP...
If you download a photo from Flickr in a size other than the original upload, your metadata is only partially maintained.
Surgery successful. Patient dead.
Unlike in the past, Flickr no longer scrapes all of your embedded metadata out of your images. Only the most relevant ones: XMP and Exif. But at least you get to hang on to the legacy ITPC/IIM metadata.
Its an improvement over scraping all your metadata and involuntarily converting your images into the dark world of orphan works.
But seriously – maintaining the extra 5 kBytes of metadata is not that hard in the year 2009, and Flickr does have more than 3 talented software developers to fix this. Photographers work hard to create works of art, not potential orphan works.
Tags: XMP
After tinkering some time with Windows 7 and its metadata capabilities, I think its time to publish some of my findings:
For consumers, Microsoft offers a new and improved software called Windows Live Photo Gallery as a free download for XP,Vista and Windows 7 (not for you Mac users, never mind). It has a pretty and shiny appearance, which is nice. Buttons and other controls are a bit splattered all over the screen, but after a while its possible to get used to its layout. Read more…
When I first tested Windows Vista in Summer 2006, I was excited to see the new Details Pane located at the bottom of the Windows Explorer. At that time, I was working on a software product called MetaMiner which had a very similar user interface concept. Showing metadata for a selected file directly in the Explorer is a great idea, I thought.
However, the pleasant feeling didn’t last too long. I am convinced the folks at Microsoft had the best intentions to make this new feature a valuable addition to the Explorer. But in my humble opinion, they missed the mark and also forgot to study the Exif specifications carefully… Read more…
