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[raldo]

Description

This is a really simple plugin which imports Microsoft Photo 1.2 schema XMP metadata from JPG images.

The face tag data is imported to MC's People tag but it is also displayed in the views using the MC "Edit Info" tag and the corresponding Text Stamp functionality. Thus you can actually see the name of people in the images!

Microsoft Photo 1.2 schema is natively used in Windows Live Photo Gallery, but the application AvPicFaceXmpTagger can export Picasa's face tags to Microsoft Photo 1.2 schema.

The reasons why I made this plugin can be found in the Information without metainformation is worthless - Now on to images... thread.

Download FaceTag Importer plugin here
Download WLPG here (My current version: 2009, build 14.8081.709)
Download AvPicFaceXmpTagger here (My current version: 1.4)
Download Picasa here (My current version: 3.6.0, build 95.25)

Some warnings

o If you have tagged people in Microsoft Photo 1.2 Schema, you should crop/rotate pictures in WLPG. Otherwise, the face rectangles will end up in the wrong places.
o The "Edit Info" tag is overwritten by this plugin since Text Stamps are used to mark people. This means that edits made in the MC image editor will be lost when you use this plugin.
o If you import to MC's "People" tag, MC will write back the people info to the file in its own format.

My Workflow

(i) Caption
Use MC to tag Caption for each image. MC stores the caption in the file and Picasa displays MC's caption.

(ii) Album
My Images are stored in folders. I use an mc expression tag (called ".Album") to store the lowermost folder name.

(iii) Geotag
I use Picasa to Geotag my photos. Picasa stores lat/lon in the image. GeoSetter is an alternative here but the GUI is not as intuitive.


(iv) Face tagging
Now, for the Face tags there are two alternatives, Wlpg and Picasa.

Keep in mind that the Picasa/AvPicFaceXmpTagger combination will overwrite existing MS Photo 1.2 Schema tags. So, tags written from WLPG will be overwritten by the  Picasa/AvPicFaceXmpTagger combination. Thus if you want to tag using both the WLPG or Picasa/AvPicFaceXmpTagger combinations  you'll probably have to keep an account of which folders were tagged by either.

(iv-A) Wlpg
Wlpg stores Facetags according to the Microsoft Photo 1.2 XMP standard. There is ONLY face detection in Wlpg (no recognition).

(iv-B) Picasa
After you have tagged images in Picasa, you need to shut it down so that it saves the data in the database. Afterwards, you need to run avpicfacexmptagger on your folders so that the images are tagged according to the MS Photo 1.2 XMP standard.

Run avpicfacexmptagger but select "Don't touch" on IPTC keywords etc. options before you press start.

(v) FaceTagImporter

You should create a new MC field for storing the face tag data in the MC database. (for example ".FaceTag")

Import the facetags in FaceTagImporter by pressing the "import metadata from files" button.

You can remove the text stamps by pressing the "Remove text stamps" button, and you can re-display them by pressing the "Populate text stamps" button.

(vi) Image date
I've used WLPG to tag date. These dates are recognized by MC.

(vii) Keywords
I don't presently use keywords, but AFAIK MC stores the keywords to images so that other applications understand them. There is an issue with delimiters of nested keywords: applications can use different delimiters such as /,\,| etc.

History

* 1.0.3
o The plugin now works in MC15

* 1.0.2:
o Improved: significantly faster import.
o New: remove/display text stamps
o New: import wlpg caption field (can be deselected)
o Fixed: Problem where text staps disappeared after viewing photo.

[raldo]

For those of you who are interested in making plugins, I have uploaded a zipped archive of the Visual Studio 2008 project too..

[JimH]

Thanks raldo.

[raldo]

[...]Visual Studio 2008 project[...]

Just a couple of comments if you'd like to modify this project to your own:
o Visual Studio 2008 with .net framework 3.5, C#
o Contains a visual studio Setup project which is quite easy to use wrt. plugins.
o The "business layer" of this project is basically the class instance called McIf .
o A good start would be to delete McIf.cs from the project and resolve the compiler errors. You should then end up with a stripped down and "ready to use" framework.
o McIf contains a couple of examples on threading.
o In this project, Bitmap metadata is extracted from images. A method on how to do this can be found in McIf.ProcessFile() with user interface thread callback (this is required).

[darichman]

Raldo, this looks great - look forward to trying it out

[raldo]

Raldo, this looks great - look forward to trying it out

Yes, please test it, D.

I also plan to import the "Caption" part in WLPG to MC. I've tagged quite a few images with WLPG Caption and discovered that it's not equivalent to IPTC caption (but Dublin Core Title). PITA.

[cncb]

Just wondering how the "people tag" is used in WLPG?  How is it different/better than using a nested keyword (e.g. "People\raldo")?

[raldo]

Just wondering how the "people tag" is used in WLPG?  How is it different/better than using a nested keyword (e.g. "People\raldo")?

The people tag is stored as XMP (that's basically XML) inside the photo. This plugin decodes that XMP information and puts it into a tag of your choice. Maybe at some later stage JRiver may decide to display the people rectangles and maybe manipulate/add new people.

I.e. the info on the location of each person in the photo is stored in the photo. I believe that the location of a person in a photo relative to other people in a photo is valuable information.

I think that the info should be stored in the image for several reasons: Firstly, it's harder to "disconnect" the info from the image. For example, a sidecar file may not follow an image during a copy operation. Or when info is stored in a proprietary DB, the info is simply stuck. Secondly, when sharing an image to the web, friends, etc. the info should follow the image.

This was discussed extensively in Information without metainformation is worthless - Now on to images...

[cncb]

This was discussed extensively in Information without metainformation is worthless - Now on to images...

Thanks - I am familiar with XMP and contributed a little to that discussion .  I was just wondering how the "people tag" was different than a standard keyword tag and it sounds like it just also includes the physical location of the person in the photo.  Interesting but I'm not sure how useful that would be (at least for me).

[raldo]

Thanks - I am familiar with XMP and contributed a little to that discussion .  I was just wondering how the "people tag" was different than a standard keyword tag and it sounds like it just also includes the physical location of the person in the photo. 

That is correct. There also is some MS specific info.

Interesting but I'm not sure how useful that would be (at least for me).

Well, currently I've used the physical location of people to order them correctly from left to right in the MC People tag.

I'm thinking that it would be a big waste to spend time tagging a lot of pictures without having access to "who is who" in the image. At some point JRiver  might decide to support the WLPG scheme, or they might implement their own tagging software (less likely). They may also expose views to plugins so that the plugin can draw in the view.

Having the data exposed in the image header also opens for conversion later on to whichever format may become popular, etc.

No matter what happens, the info is valuable.

[raldo]

"New" Version out, 1.0.0.0. The main "new thing" is that Text Stamps display names in the images.

I've also tested AvPicFaceXmpTagger to see if I could start using Picasa for face tagging. Yes can do...

[raldo]

I just found a "minor problem" with the plugin.

When images are viewed on on the big screen, the face Text Stamps are removed from the image.

(Why: at an earlier stage, I tried to add an option where the Text Stamps could be omitted from the BigScreen. This code didn't work properly since MC didn't honor my removal of the text stamps based on the playlist state. Some of this code was left in there which explains this behavior)

I'll make a new version where you can remove/add all Text Stamps. Unfortunately, this cannot be done when browsing since the MC event system doesn't notify an image change at an "early enough stage"

[raldo]

1.0.2:
o Improved: significantly faster import.
o New: remove/display text stamps
o New: import wlpg caption field (can be deselected)
o Fixed: Problem where text staps disappeared after viewing photo.

[raldo]

* 1.0.3
o The plugin now works in MC15

[darichman]

Raldo - I am letting Picasa do its thing with face recognition on my Photo Library. This plugin is going to get a serious workout soon.

[raldo]

Raldo - I am letting Picasa do its thing with face recognition on my Photo Library. This plugin is going to get a serious workout soon.

Good, keep me posted!

[darichman]

Wow... several days of picasa analysing my photos and only 7% through! I'm growing a beard waiting.
I think I might just do a subset for now to test the functionality and workflow.

Raldo, I assume this is the way you're doing all your people tagging now? A few questions for you and anyone who's tried using Picasa and MC:

• Do you use the 'sync names with google account' feature. This seems interesting! It does mean you'll get some entries in your contacts without actual contact details, but I don't think that's a huge problem. It also means you can easily find contact info for people in your people (or keywords) tags. So you can do a three way sync between Picasa, Gmail/contacts and and your chosen phone, and also a one-way sync with MC. Not sure of the implications with Notes but theoretically we could have some nice integration between MC's people field and your contacts web.
• Picasa stores the Face/name data next to the photo in the folder. Unfortunately, my photos move around a lot with my MC workflow - as I tag album etc I run rename expressions every now and then on the whole library to clean everything up. Naturally the picasa database files aren't going to go with it... I'm going to have to do a bit of testing to see how Picasa handles imported files which are moved on the database (ie does it smartly detect that the files have moved and retains the face data, or is the information lost?)
• Why do you select ' "Don't touch" on IPTC keywords etc. options before you press start. '

I'm sure I'll have more... I'm just trying to figure out the best way to manage the workflow before I dive in and do it on thousands of files. Thanks for showing yours btw - I think I'll do something similar.

[HTPC4ME]

little confused sorry.

ive downloaded picasa. and this face recognition is sweet.

how can we get picasa to save the tags to people? or do we have to use the plugin you've made for jriver then save the faces to people tag in our pics?

id like to just use picasa to quickly tag all my people so they show up as people in jriver.

anyway to use this or another app that can pull out cars, trees, sky, flowers etc as well and tag those as keywords?

thanks for clarification.

[raldo]

Wow... several days of picasa analysing my photos and only 7% through! I'm growing a beard waiting.
I think I might just do a subset for now to test the functionality and workflow.

A subset is a good idea. You can limit the folders Picasa scans.

Raldo, I assume this is the way you're doing all your people tagging now? A few questions for you and anyone who's tried using Picasa and MC:

Yes, in a sense. I'm mixing WLPG with Picasa. The problem with Picasa is that it's good, but closed, so you cannot import data back to Picasa. One has to stay focused doing this kind of thing!

• Do you use the 'sync names with google account' feature. This seems interesting! It does mean you'll get some entries in your contacts without actual contact details, but I don't think that's a huge problem. It also means you can easily find contact info for people in your people (or keywords) tags. So you can do a three way sync between Picasa, Gmail/contacts and and your chosen phone, and also a one-way sync with MC. Not sure of the implications with Notes but theoretically we could have some nice integration between MC's people field and your contacts web.

I don't use this feature...

• Picasa stores the Face/name data next to the photo in the folder. Unfortunately, my photos move around a lot with my MC workflow - as I tag album etc I run rename expressions every now and then on the whole library to clean everything up. Naturally the picasa database files aren't going to go with it... I'm going to have to do a bit of testing to see how Picasa handles imported files which are moved on the database (ie does it smartly detect that the files have moved and retains the face data, or is the information lost?)

Yes, this is a big problem with Picasa, and it's not only a problem for MC usere but also Picasa Users. I don't know a way around this and I have found that it's best to leave things the way they are after picasa has scanned the photos.

• Why do you select ' "Don't touch" on IPTC keywords etc. options before you press start. '

Because I want to preserve the keywords.

I'm sure I'll have more... I'm just trying to figure out the best way to manage the workflow before I dive in and do it on thousands of files. Thanks for showing yours btw - I think I'll do something similar.

Well, I have tried to come up with something that "works" and it kinda does.

[raldo]

how can we get picasa to save the tags to people? or do we have to use the plugin you've made for jriver then save the faces to people tag in our pics?

id like to just use picasa to quickly tag all my people so they show up as people in jriver.

Well, you can make Picasa save to a photos People (IPTC) tag *as is*. I've never done this but I'm sure you can find out how using google.

The point of this plugin is to also be able to display Labels of each person in MC's image view (by using MC's Text Stamp functionality.By applying an intermediate step (see workflow above) you can export the face tag rectangles to the photo header in XMP (MS Photo 1.2 schema)

anyway to use this or another app that can pull out cars, trees, sky, flowers etc as well and tag those as keywords?

Nope, afaik anyways.

[rgouyet]

I install it with JRiver MC 17 but the manual load of the plugin failed...
Does it work with this last release ?

[bytestar]

To get this work create a reg file with the following content and import it, or use this reg files (default installation folder)

For Windows 32bit

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JRiver\Media Center 17]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins\Interface]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins\Interface\FaceTagImport]
"IVersion"=dword:00000001
"ProdID"="MCPlugin.FaceTagImport"
"URL"="-"
"PluginMode"=dword:00000001
"Copyright"="Copyright (c) 2010, HaraldW"
"Version"="1.0.3"
"Company"="-"

For Windows 64bit

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JRiver\Media Center 17]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins\Interface]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\JRiver\Media Center 17\Plugins\Interface\FaceTagImport]
"IVersion"=dword:00000001
"ProdID"="MCPlugin.FaceTagImport"
"URL"="-"
"PluginMode"=dword:00000001
"Copyright"="Copyright (c) 2010, HaraldW"
"Version"="1.0.3"
"Company"="-"