IPTC support

Hello
Searching this forum I found a request for the IPTC support dated almost two years ago. Unfortunately, it is still not implemented in Dopus while Vista has editable IPTC fields in the file properties dialog. Is there any hope that the IPTC support will be implemented in Dopus in the nearest future?
Best regards, Toller

Just commenting to say that I would love this too as I spend a lot of my time working with/editing IPTC data.:slight_smile:

Hi,

just read your post...

I am writing IPTC too and use a very good program. Look for "iMatch" by photools. Only in engl language available. It has some really nice scripts which can be self defined. The script you might look for is: All Purpose IPTC Writer. It has a pdf file inside for further explanation, there is also a forum available.

I sure would also like to see -but not edit - IPTC data in DO, like when you move the cursor over one picture (now it shows only the EXIF Data)....mayby in the next version.

dp_fan

when you move the cursor over one picture (now it shows only the EXIF Data)

if vista support IPTC info in infotips, you can add {infotip} in image file type group (info tip tab).

Hey dp_fan, good to see another IMatch user in here. I agree with you about it, in fact to me IMatch is the Opus of photo management. :smiley:

I'm going to go out on a limb here to suggest the primary reason there isn't more support for IPTC and EXIF in Opus might be because of the enormous amount of never ending work that would have to go into providing it. Many times Mario (IMatch developer) has mentioned it takes him hours to update the metadata capability of IMatch for EACH new camera that is released. I'm mostly referring to the ever increasingly popular RAW file formats now, not JPGs or TIFFs.

So in that regard I can certainly understand why any file manager developer wouldn't be too thrilled about adding much support (if any) for camera metadata. On the other hand, the text based xmp format is slowly evolving now (quite painfully at the moment) so perhaps if and when the day comes when that stabilizes into a metadata standard, adding support for it to Opus will be much more practical.

IMHO the core problem boils down to this. While the specifications for EXIF and IPTC are well established industry standards, the reading and writing of EXIF and IPTC metadata is not standardized at all. And this has resulted in a very chaotic problem within the photographic community.

Hopefully xmp will eventually resolve that very annoying problem for many of us.

[quote="JohnZeman"]I'm going to go out on a limb here to suggest the primary reason there isn't more support for IPTC and EXIF in Opus might be because of the enormous amount of never ending work that would have to go into providing it. Many times Mario (IMatch developer) has mentioned it takes him hours to update the metadata capability of IMatch for EACH new camera that is released. I'm mostly referring to the ever increasingly popular RAW file formats now, not JPGs or TIFFs.
[/quote]

The problem is with MakerNotes part of EXIF and new RAW formats.
There is no problem with writing EXIF or IPTC, because these two are standarised. The problems is, that other applications often write EXIF/IPTC headers not properly.

IPTC is very inflexible and that's why it's going to be replaced by XMP. EXIF is still to be used for image/camera data.

I agree, XMP specs change every other month and it's not mature enough for non-image management apps.

But they ARE. Badly behaving applications (often added to cameras) are the problem.

Personally, I'd like support for all standard EXIF fields, like Title, Subject, Author, Keywords, Comment, Image Description (yes, EXIF fields).

X.

[quote="Xyzzy"]The problem is with MakerNotes part of EXIF and new RAW formats.
There is no problem with writing EXIF or IPTC, because these two are standarised. The problems is, that other applications often write EXIF/IPTC headers not properly. [/quote]

Good point Xyzzy, I could have chosen my words better than I did. The primary message I wanted to convey, which you appear to agree with, is the current camera metadata environment has much room for improvement.

There should be a law that says if you're going to create a fileformat standard, be it a compression algorithm or a metadata format, that people can reasonably expect other programs to support then you must provide a C or C++ library (from which any other binding is easy to create) that supports that standard and keep it up to date, for free or for a reasonable licence fee. Anyone not doing this is taken outside and shot. :slight_smile:

It'd solve a lot of problems in the computing world, I think.

On a more serious note, is there stuff in IPTC that isn't in EXIF? Do programs which write IPTC typically also write the equivalent EXIF data (where there's an overlap)?

What I read suggested that IPTC was XML (once you located and extracted the chunk of data from within the image file). Is that true or is that an in-progress change? It sounds, from what you've all said, like supporting IPTC could be a real pain and a time waster until it's matured or unless someone volunteers to take on the project as a plugin or a library that is actively maintained can be found to provide the support.

[quote="nudel"]On a more serious note, is there stuff in IPTC that isn't in EXIF? Do programs which write IPTC typically also write the equivalent EXIF data (where there's an overlap)?

What I read suggested that IPTC was XML (once you located and extracted the chunk of data from within the image file). Is that true or is that an in-progress change? It sounds, from what you've all said, like supporting IPTC could be a real pain and a time waster until it's matured or unless someone volunteers to take on the project as a plugin or a library that is actively maintained can be found to provide the support.[/quote]

Leo I'm certainly not an authority on image metadata, whatever I say here is based upon what I've read and heard in other photography related forums. FWIW here is my general take on the differences between EXIF/IPTC and XMP.

EXIF is primarily camera generated metadata and consists of the camera make, model, focus mode, shutter speed, ISO, and so on. It also has a few additional fields such as one for comments, but primarily it's intended to be camera metadata only. The makernotes that Xyzzy referenced are specific camera manufacturer add-on EXIF fields. Canon has their own set of EXIF makernote fields, Nikon has their own, as do most other camera manufacturers. This doesn't help the metadata problem when each manufacturer marches to their own metadata drumbeat. Add that to the fact there is no industry standard in generating raw files (unless you count DNG which isn't universally accepted yet) and you can see why things are rather messed up in the digital photography world.

On the other hand the IPTC metadata standard was created to be used exclusively for user information. That would be the things we might want to enter into the metadata of our images like a caption, location, etc. Rather than my going into a detailed description of what fields IPTC contains and their limits, you might take a look at the unofficial IPTC table at the following web site: sinus.ch/iptctable.html

With either EXIF or IPTC you are usually editing the actual image file itself. So there is some risk, albeit very small, that an image file could become corrupt after the metadata has been altered. I've processed the metadata of almost 20,000 images over the past 3 years and that has never happened to me but I recognize the possibility that it could.

And then awhile back along came Adobe introducing its new xmp concept. Xmp does not alter the image file in any way, instead it's a text based buddy file with the same name as the image it's connected to (other than the .xmp file extension that is). It's not the same but in a way you could kind of compare the function of an xmp buddy file to the way a descript.ion file works. Only there's one xmp file for each image, and it contains a whole lot more than just a description.

Anyway, the possibilities of xmp are almost limitless at this point. Not only can it contain duplicates of all the EXIF and IPTC metadata, in the case of Adobe Lightroom it also contains all the modifications you may make to an image. This allows you to make changes to an image on one computer and then transfer that image to another computer while retaining all the changes you'd made. That doesn't sound like a big deal until you take into consideration the original image was never actually altered at all. All the editing changes were not written to the image file, instead they are written to the xmp file. Which means you can always revert an image back to the same state it was when it came out of the camera. At least that's how it works in Lightroom.

While IMatch will let me alter an image's IPTC and xmp metadata, it does restrict what I can edit in EXIF to only the image timestamps. This is not universal as some programs, such as with the free Exifer, or the command line tool I use called ExifUtils. Each of those allow me to set or change either IPTC or EXIF metadata. Not all EXIF fields, but a fair amount of the fields can be changed.

You're right that xmp is xml based but it's also an infant at this point. xmp has much evolving to do but I tend to believe it is the future of image metadata. Whether it will eventually replace EXIF and/or IPTC metadata can only be speculated on at this point.

What a pain. :slight_smile: So rather than all the companies getting together and agreeing how to make one standard work we now have three standards that all need supporting and even those aren't consistently used.

Who would have ever believed such a state of affairs was possible???

When C++ was being developed back in the days, at some point there was proposal, that anyone suggesting new feature should donate his kidney.
This way even most pushy members of the language commitee would have had no more than 2 trials :slight_smile:

X.

Hello,
From reading this thread I came to sad conclusion that implementation of the IPTC is not feasible in the nearest future. While the choice of the features in the program is determined by a trade-off between different and conflicting requirements I would like to add a few comments regarding IPTC and related things.

  1. AFAIK the EXIF specification does not have a few very useful fields; the most important of them are keywords. Therefore, to support file tags, the implementation of IPTC is important.
  2. Vista has support for the keywords out the box. The DO is advertized as the Explorer replacement. In my opinion it means that the DO should do everything that the Explorer can do. Unfortunately, this feature is not implemented in DO so far.
  3. Implementation of IPTC support is not very difficult. As a rough indication, there are tens programs written by single developer, which can read and even write IPTC fields without any problem. If Windows Explorer can do this than there certainly should be API’s for this purpose.
  4. Nudel put a lot of efforts in implementation of the Camera RAW support. Unfortunately, it seems for me that he ran out gas a few loops before finish. As most obvious example of this – auto-rotation. As I understand (correct me if I am wrong), reading Exif fields in RAW files is not implemented in the plug-in, that’s why the plug-in cannot auto-rotate RAW images. Contrarily, I have installed the Canon codec and the Windows Explorer rotates seamlessly CR2 images in the preview pan. May be it would be much more better not to implement the RAW support but wait when the manufactures will deliver codecs for their image formats.

Sorry if I wrote (here and in other posts) something that irritates the DO’s developers. I use your program less than two months (my trail version is still not expired but I already ordered a few licenses). I fell in love with it and the only reason for my criticism is my desire to make it better to attract more users.
Best regards, Toller.

As it happens I was doing some work on a new Raw plugin today but until my sabbatical kicks in my day-job will continue to get in the way of Opus plugin work. The plugin is far from dead, though.

The RAW plugin should, unless configured not to, auto-rotate full image decodes but not thumbnails at the moment. This is further confused by an issue that was discovered recently where certain RAW filetypes which are stored as custom TIFF images have their EXIF data read by Opus which then rotates the thumbnails sometimes (but not others). It's all on my list of things to address, as is auto-rotation of thumbnails.

That could be a long wait. The camera makers, in general, seem to be idiots when it comes to giving people access to their raw formats, even in the form of codecs. I didn't realise that Canon had provided a codec though (this isn't just Microsoft's Raw viewer at work?). It'd make sense to write a plugin which hooks into that and similar codecs if the API is decent. If you have any information on it please send it my way.

Supporting all current and future IPTC formats seems very difficult at this stage. Supporting a subset of them wouldn't be difficult but then people would surely complain that Opus says it supports IPTC yet doesn't work with their files. It isn't my choice what GPSoft choose to do but, personally, I'd wait for the specification to settle down before coding anything, unless someone else is maintaining a library which can be hooked into Opus while the effort to support and keep up with all the variations of IPTC is externalised and doesn't tie up GPSoftware (or a plugin author like me :slight_smile:) from doing other things.

There's always going to be something that falls through the cracks, especially in versions of Explorer that have only just come out. Anyway, if you want Opus to do everything that Explorer does then Opus would have to suck, since Explorer does that. :slight_smile:

So, my overall take on it is that the best solution would be for someone with knowledge and experience of IPTC, and a commitment to keeping such a project up to date, should write an IPTC library that other programs can use for IPTC support. Otherwise IPTC support will fast become a resource drain and prevent more important features being added. Maybe there is already such a library out there?

Perhaps we should use the Windows Imaging Components (WIC) http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms737408.aspx.
It's build in vista and you can get it as addon for XP and Win2003. It has an API for reading and writing Metadata. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms737407.aspx

WIC looks good on paper. I remember reading about it when it was really new and thinking it might be good in future, but then I forgot all about it.

After reading up on the current state of play with WIC it seems that several (at least three) camera manufactures have released WIC codecs for their raw files so I take back what I said earlier. It looks quite viable, assuming the codecs and APIs are decent.

I don't think I can do much with the metadata side of things (that probably needs changes in Opus itself) but creating a plugin which adds WIC support to Opus seems like a no-brainer now (just a matter of finding a spare weekend, or waiting for my sabbatical to start).

Nudel,

In my response I can only acknowledge my gratitude to you for all you are doing for the DO. Also, your willingness to follow the reasonable arguments certainly encourages me to continue to post in this forum. :laughing: I look forward to see your plug-in for Vista codecs.
Toller.