Can DOpus read keywords stored in IPTC of an image? I have all my images tagged with keywords that some organizers can read and categorize. But, all the dedicated photo organizers I tried are too slow. I was thinking it would be great if I could sort and search on image keywords in DOpus.
If this isn't possible, is there another way to categorize images in DOpus? I already have a pretty good filing scheme for my images but that still falls short when searching for common keywords across folders. Anybody else use Dopus to organize photos?
Before I get flamed, I did search the manual. I see that DOPus can read exif data and rotate images accordingly. I didn't see anything about IPTC or keywords (for images).
We have been looking at adding IPTC support, the main thing that is holding us back is that there are literally hundreds of defined fields, so we're a bit lost in knowing which ones to add
I used Opus to organize my photos up until a year ago last summer when I realized my digital collection of photographs was growing so fast that soon no file manager was going to be able to keep up with everything. So FWIW I ended up going with a specialized program called IMatch to handle my images and I've been VERY happy with it.
I don't know if you've given IMatch a try but if not you might take a peek.
Advice: The restriction of the category (2:15) to three characters is as depracated as the field itself, but it is in wild use and very often with more than three characters, more like the 64 characters of the supplementary category entries.
For repeatable fields: These forbid line breaks inside entries, so a simple textarea field is good enough for entering multiple entries, no complex list field needed!
IMHO right now with the entire image metadata situation being a huge convoluted mess thanks to Adobe trying to shove their proprietary xmp format down everyone's throat, I don't think I'd add IPTC support to Opus at all until the dust settles. FWIW below is a direct quote regarding the current status of metadata from Mario Westphal, the author of IMatch.
[quote="Mario Westphal"]Standard IPTC is dying quickly. Adobe is using their monopoly and the influence they have on stock photo agencies and the IPTC steering committee to make sure that standard IIM IPTC (Adobe labels this 'legacy') will be outdated soon. The market power of Adobe and the fact that nearly everybody in the industry must use Photoshop also adds weight to the XMP stuff. Adobe will for sure at some point in time just stop to support standard IPTC in their applications and exclusively rely on XMP.
The EXIF mess (especially the maker notes) is not really tackled by XMP, so there will be no change soon. The approach of IMatch to wrap it into XMP to make it accessible to users works quite well so far.
A conference on the future of EXIF in held in August in Germany, so perhaps we can make some changes there, e.g. wrapping EXIF into an XMP envolope for easier processing/ transfer between files. But that would require the camera vendors to play along, and I doubt they care. Not after they still rely on their oh-so-fantastic RAW formats.
The industry will switch to XMP over the next years, no doubt about that. Adobe is taking care that XMP becomes widely known (check the press over the next couple of months for articles about XMP, for example).
Unless Google comes up with gYMP or something alike, only Microsoft has the market power to promote a different metadata standard. Which they will, along the line of their new "better" JPEG image format. Adobe has DNG so Microsoft needs also their own image format (plus metadata, probably). Having control over the imaging formats and metadata formats you use for your images gives these companies also some level of control over your buying decisions, and that's what this is all about.[/quote]
There are millions of pictures out there using IPTC. The standard is ooold. Agencies have used IPTC since the early nineties and those huge libraries of images using it are not just going away because Adobe decides to introduce antoher format. Every ambitious image management tool will have to support the reading of IPTC and if just to convert it to XMP. Introducing IPTC support for the basic values is no big deal and even adding edit support is not worthless (see sentence before this one).
I agree with you completely. However if any IPTC support is added to Opus now it would only be a matter of time before someone asked why Opus couldn't see the IPTC metadata they had entered with Lightroom (or some variation of a question like that).
Yep, that's right. That's why reimplementing stuff is so bad. Use an existing library! This way, if something goes wrong, you can always blame the library! Google yielded http://www.exiv2.org/ and http://libiptcdata.sourceforge.net/ as possible victims.
