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.

After tinkering some time with Windows 7 and its metadata capabilities, I think its time to publish some of my findings:

• Good: Windows 7 handles XMP metadata better than Vista
• Bad: its still not right…
• Ugly: remains a Grim Reaper – may eat and hide your metadata

Read more…

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…