FileMind is a file manager that aims on saving you time and aggravation when dealing with files and folder structures that are as deep as the Amazon river. Unline Metability, which aims at metadata enthusiasts, the new FileMind is a great productivity tool for every Windows user. It is installed in minutes and requires zero training.

Ready for saving yourself some time? Head over to www.filemind.net and check it out! Take a look at the intro video:

Copyright Laws are… not Helping You!

Most countries in the civilized world have realized that creative work is real work that should be attributed to the creator and compensated. Powerful legislation has been established by most governments, even in seemingly lawless places such as China.

But unless your name is Lady Gaga or Apple, it’s difficult to proof it’s your work, which makes it much harder to go after people and companies that violate your copyright by stealing your work, without permission and without compensation.

Avoid to Become Orphan Work

Another threat for monetizing creative work is pending (or in some cases established) new legislation that makes images, video, text or audio automatically a freebie for all if the copyright owner can’t be identified. In other words, saying “Oh, I didn’t know” when you catch someone with his hands in the cookie jar won’t get him more than a slap on the wrist. This encourages stealing of content.

Fight Back and Register your Work

Luckily, the internet is not just for copyrights violators, you have a number of ways to get your work identified and registered. Here is a list of websites and services that can help:

PLUS Registry

The PLUS Coalition is a non-profit organization with broad industry support (Adobe, Getty Images, IPTC,  Corbis and most leading photographer associations) that mainly focuses on image rights. It established a very important metadata standard (an XMP schema, to be precise) that allows to manifest all rights and licensing details of a photograph within the file itself (embedded metadata). The website offers a convenient tool to create custom-tailored license conditions, based on a commonly accepted set of legal terms.
PLUS recently extend its services with a free Registry for photographers and other content owners that issues a unique ID for the person / organization. The new service is officially still in Beta, but works well. At a later stage, it will be possible to register images and licenses along with a promising reverse image recognition feature.

U.S. Copyright Office

The most bullet-proof way of registering your copyright is … you guessed it: the U.S. Copyright office. Due to its complex processes, it’s not the best choice for common commercial work such as photographs, literature and music. Dealing with the government isn’t exactly fast and easy. Besides, every registration requires a fee – no freebies here. Money-saving hint: Safe Creative includes a small number of U.S. Copyright Office registrations in their subscription fee.

Safe Creative

If you want your work not only properly registered, but are interested to hunt plagiarists down, then Safe Creative might be the right choice for you. These folks really offer a massive one-stop-shop, from registering your work in various convenient ways, to custom licensing services, to tools for finding copycats and even all the way to sending Cease and Desist letters to their physical mailboxes.  It doesn’t break the bank either, you can start with a limited free account or go with a Premium or Pro account (sets you back 24 /64 Euros per year). Safe Creative has its headquarters in Spain and an office in San Mateo, CA. No words about how long they’ve been around on their site.

Numly

As its name already suggests, Numly provides you with unique electronic serial numbers to protect your precious work items. All you need to do is to upload them and Numly will ID them, with serial number, time stamp and a digital fingerprint. It’s a commercial service, 100 Numly numbers run you $100 per year. They offer an API that allows to check serials and also assign new ones from a third party application (WordPress plug-in and Mac OSX Widget are available for free). Numly is based in Phoenix, AZ and has been around since 2006.

Duly Registered

Based in the UK (with pricing showing only in British Pounds) and operating since 2004, Duly Registered offers copyright registrations for musicians, writers, photographers, filmmakers, bloggers, designers and many more categories. Registrations are billed for 10 years in one chunk, 200 photos run currently at 300 Pounds, which translates to about $500 of New World money.

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Avoid the Naked Truth

JPEG files can have a small preview (aka thumbnail) embedded inside Exif. A number of applications show them when image sets are browsed. However, this preview is not always updated when you crop the image.
This can lead to pretty embarrassing consequences: TV host Cat Schwartz exposed herself naked (PC World, Labnol). Striping that preview image is therefore a good thing…

Avoid the Stalking

Sharing photos often means sharing pictures of your family. Nothing is more important than our kids, right?  Then you should make sure that those memories posted on your blog are scrubbed of its metadata. Otherwise, its embedded location, date and time will give strangers a whole lot more than you like. NBC Action News explains how easy it is to to track it all (KSHB in Kansas City, MS):

So – you say this won’t happen to you, because you are way too smart, right? Consider this: Adam Savage, the host of the popular TV show “MythBusters” posted a picture in front of his garage on Twitter – including all of its GPS data and time of day (NYT article). The tweet “Now it’s off to work” gave a potential thief not only the street address, but also at what time he left.

Avoid the Leakage

Besides data that smartphones and digital cameras add automatically, image files often also include a number of personal, descriptive information (names, addresses, email, detailed description, ratings etc) that has been added by your image management software or just the Windows File Explorer.

FileMind QuickFix

We figured that not everybody wants to dive into file metadata on a forensic level. Luckily, not everybody needs to. At least not Windows users who  just want to remove metadata quickly from some photos, before they share them on the big, bad Interweb…

FileMind QuickFix

FileMind QuickFix is a Freeware that utilizes the same MetaMind Framework as the heavyweight FileMind Pro software. It’s designed to do just one job, which is to remove any Exif, Iptc/IIM and XMP metadata that may be present in JPEG image files.

Why not more features? Because it’s designed to be a handy, dandy little speed demon without a lot of hassle. Just drop the files in the window, click the QuickFix Metadata button, and its done. You can see it in action in this short YouTube video.

Windows Explorer cleans files only partially

In theory, Microsoft Windows would be all you need, it already comes with a metadata scrubbing feature. You can find it when you click with the right mouse button on the image file and select Properties. The Details tab offers a link at the bottom, called “Remove Properties and Personal Information”. What is thought to be a nice gesture by Microsoft can leave you in the rain: this feature only scrubs a fraction of the embedded metadata, not the entire information (see table left).

This recent photo shows President Obama, along with a group of White House officials, in the Situation Room. They are watching the Osama Bin Laden capture, and this caught my attention. I applaud the policy of the Obama administration to release press photos to the general public via Flickr. The most interesting information I found, however, was not so much the actual image, but rather the embedded metadata…

Is it Original?

The short answer is: NO. Pete Souza (the official White House photographer) shot this scene in RAW format (*.CR2), and it has been modified a great deal, with the help of the software Photo Mechanic and Adobe Photoshop CS 5 on a Mac. It was also converted into the  JPEG format, for easier web viewing.

The Obvious: Blurred Visual Parts

Blurred Image

This is the White House Situation Room after all, where the outcome of entire wars has been decided. So it’s no surprise that they had to blur some details that where too sensitive to show. Actually, more humorous for me was to see that the White House runs their own little Starbucks-style branding: the disposable coffee cup carries the seal of the President of the United States.

The Truth: Camera Details

Pete Souza shot this picture with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II that had a Canon EF35mm (f/1.4L USM) wide angle lens attached to it. This is professional gear, and I assume the quality of the image justifies the $4,000 price tag for it.

The common Exif metadata tags reveal an abundance of picture-taking conditions, such as a 3.6 aperture, a manually set exposure time of 0.01 seconds, an ISO value of 1600 and that the shot was made without flash. Also, the typically very chatty custom Canon metadata tags (known as Exif Maker Notes) have been stripped from the file.

The Metadata Surprises

Exif Time shows 4 PM

President Obama announced the capture of Osama Bin Laden shortly before midnight on May 1st, 2011. Several Exif tags embedded in the picture clearly indicate that these eyeballs, glued to a video screen on the opposite  side of the room, are looking at the action at 4.05 PM Washington Time (EDT), more than six hours earlier. The official statement of the White House says only “earlier today”, the metadata give us a much more precise point of time.

The embedded metadata details clearly show that the photo has been edited with Photoshop CS5 on a Macintosh computer the following day. The original name of the RAW file was P050111PS-0210.CR2 and it was edited, converted to JPEG and saved multiple times that day, at 12.23PM, then 1.46PM, then 2.55 PM, then 3.13 PM, then 3.23 PM and ultimately at 5.00 PM. It looks like the White House doesn’t take any changes and reviews its press pictures rather intensely….

The Informative

The picture is stuffed like turkey with content metadata, such as description, copyright, location details (but no GPS) and photographer information, most likely done with the software Photo Mechanic. The tags were embedded in Exif, IPTC (IIM) and XMP blocks, which is helpful to make sure that users will see at least some metadata, no matter how old their softwareor how basic a websites’ metadata support is (I am looking at you, Flickr, Facebook and others).

The icing on the cake would have been a few keywords for easy search indexing and a Spanish version of the description and copyright fields – but no luck here. Not many metadata editors support description fields in multiple languages (our software FileMind does), so maybe this will come in the future.

Oh, and just in case you are in the market for a used Canon EOS 5D Mark II anytime soon: ask the seller for its serial number – you’re in luck if it says 520303004. This would mean you are about to acquire this ‘presidential’ camera that was used to take the picture.

The upcoming release will progress from 0.6 to 0.8, with most of the enhancements inside the code and framework. We are also adding a new dialog window that will change the way you can add new metadata fields to a file. This dialog is also going to be the base for more sophisticated features, such as creating metadata templates and applying them to one or more files in a single step.

The current PDF plug-in also gets a major overhaul, with added support for complex PDF files, encryption and more stability in regards to XMP extraction and writing.

So for now, it’s Happy New Year for everybody – and stay tuned for the new beta!

Hyper Smash

Just don’t expect your metadata to stay intact…

Claim to Fame…

When done right, turning a JPEG image by 90° increments doesn’t alter the actual image data. The biggest roadblock a software may run into is that it has to slightly crop the picture (if pixel width/height is not divisible by 8) – a constraint of the JPEG compression.

Windows performs this task generally without a hitch. It also updates the Exif “Orientation” field, which is a good thing. So far, so good.

But why hijacking the “Software” field? It’s, overwritten with “Microsoft Windows Photo Viewer”! This Exif field is there to manifest what software / camera firmware actually created the JPEG image (i.e., from the photo sensor). Different firmware renders different pictures, so leaving this field untouched is about as vital as knowing what camera model was used. The only time this field should be updated is when a software truly changes the image data. This is not the case when it is turned.

Cemented into XMP

If not present, Windows takes the liberty and also stuffs an XMP metadata block into the image file, adding a whopping 12 kilobytes to its size. It’s only content? You guessed it: a single field (xmp:CreatorTool) containing “Microsoft Windows Photo Viewer”…

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.

Dirty Job

In most cases, this is an uneventful job. Unless you run out of compatible hardware, which happened to me when I tried to restore 2GB DAT tapes from 1998 on a newer HP DAT DDS3 streamer. Even though the device was supposed to be backward-compatible, this turned out to be not the case. I was lucky enough to have  a friend that still owned an older device (and older SCSI controller) that was able to read the tapes.

After I recovered the files, my quest for a compatible restore program started – the backup was written in a format that is no longer commonly available (even though the company is still around). A job I intended to complete in one hour ended up taking three weeks, along with lots of anxiety and plenty of  frustration.

Argh. No Metadata!

The old tape backup contained mostly images, documents, spreadsheets and a few presentations. About half of the files have been created by myself, the other half was created by colleagues. I was grateful to have all the applications around that were needed to read the different file formats. However, the file and folder names didn’t convince me at all that I found what I was actually looking for. Needless to say, none of the files had any meaningful metadata in its headers.

The Truth is not in the File

I ended up spending a lot of time loading and viewing the actual files itself – just to see if they contain what I am looking for. I wish I would have had the comfort of files with metadata tags.

So, no matter if you work at a Fortune 500 company or a small business: tag your files! You thank yourself later.

The file browser in Windows Vista / Windows 7 as well as Mac OSX offer a comfortable way to do this now, and tagging files there is usually easier there than in the application itself. The fields that are offered are good enough for basic tagging. If you need more specific fields or if you want so peek deeper into file metadata, take a look at special tools such as our product FileMind.

Even if you only edit two or three fields, this will tremendously increase your chances to find the right file again – a real time saver!

If you work in a large organization with the luxury of an ECM system (SharePoint, Documentum etc.), this is still important. The metadata details that are visible to you in the ECM system are most likely not updated inside the file metadata – you are out of luck once you check-out files and have them on your PC.

Besides its ethical issue, backdating stock options is illegal if you don’t tell the IRS, SEC and the company shareholders. Nevertheless, this hardly appears to be a deterrent – executives in more than 130 companies have done so in the past.

The Truth is in the File

All popular document file formats retain a large number of details that are not all obvious to the person that views or even edits it. Microsoft Word files reveal the date a document was created, last printed and last edited; some files even disclose details such as the name of the editor, revision number or the total edit time.

Some information can be stripped with a built-in functionality of Windows:  a right mouse click on a Word file shows the properties dialog, and the tab Details has a nice function called ‘Remove Properties and Personal Information”. However, the date created and last edited will not be wiped off.

PDF files aren’t any less talkative, either: along with the creation date they typically show the name of the originating application and file (i.e., name of the Word file that was used to generate the PDF) and even its author.

Courts include Metadata

In the case Ryan v. Gifford (Delaware Court of Chancery, Nov. 30, 2007) , the court ordered the production of documents along with its metadata. It considered this relevant in a stock options backdating case in which the  exact date granting stock options was at issue. It also ordered the production of communications with the SEC.

This is also true in most U.S. states, the U.S. federal level (since the Federal Civil Discovery Rules were amended in  2006) and many countries around the world.

A major argument against considering metadata as a part of a document used to be cost and the time it takes. However, tools such as our very own FileMind (for Windows) are easy to use, very inexpensive and can even create reports (PDF or Excel) on the fly.

]]> http://www.knowyourfiles.com/2010/01/backdated-your-stock-options-lately/feed/ 1 http://www.knowyourfiles.com/2009/11/iptc-and-the-beetle/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=iptc-and-the-beetle http://www.knowyourfiles.com/2009/11/iptc-and-the-beetle/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:54:21 +0000 hfremuth http://www.knowyourfiles.com/?p=311 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.

Vlad was kind enough to publish both parts of the interview on his site:

http://www.organizepictures.com/2009/11/image-metadata-standards-history
http://www.organizepictures.com/2009/11/where-is-image-metadata-going

I don’t expect everyone to fully agree with all facets of it, but I simply couldn’t resist to put a little spin on the sometimes dry matter of metadata standards. Enjoy!

The current Beta 0.6 is based on the MetaMind Framework (MMF), a massive underpinning that gives you endless metadata configuration and customization capabilities. It supports XMP, IPTC/IIM, Exif, MS Office (COM and OOXML), Windows Media, RIFF, ID3 and pretty much any popular file format under the sun.

FileMind is developed by my company Metability Software. We tinker and play focus entirely on software solutions for file metadata, nothing else. Join us playing… ;-)