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More => Old Versions => JRiver Media Center 24 for Windows => Topic started by: darichman on May 05, 2018, 07:32:35 pm

Title: Photos & Date Handling, Advice?
Post by: darichman on May 05, 2018, 07:32:35 pm

Hi all.

In a fit of uncharacteristic motivation I've been revisiting my photo tagging and organisation. I've come up against a few snags, and have been trying to reconcile options and optimise workflow.

A few points:

• My 'photo' collection is a large and varied collection of image files of varying file types (some easily taggable and some not) and sources (eg many scanned images of older printed photos as well as digital camera/phone photos)
• I would ideally like to stick with MC for as much of my workflow as possible, but have to venture out to other programs where MC is unable to perform certain tasks (face tagging, geotagging, batch update of dates & date shifting, EXIF editing)
• The capabilities of google photos (and other cloud services) are becoming hard to ignore. All of my Pixel 2 photos get uploaded to Google Photos and the results are pretty impressive, with some drawbacks per below.
• Sometimes editing photos or metadata in programs external to MC can change tags/metadata in unexpected ways (examples below)
• Photo editing is probably a separate beast so I'll leave that out of this thread.

My previous workflow was:

• Import photos in MC and perform initial tagging of my mandatory fields (album, date etc)
• Import photos into Picasa and face tag / geotag (Old thread on importing Picasa face XMP tags: Link (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=80907.msg553104#msg553104))
• Perform 'update library from tags' in MC to populate people and geolocation data
• Finalise tagging: keywords, captions etc

Here are my problems with my current workflow:

• Picasa is now no longer supported, so I'm reticent to continue to invest too much of it in my workflow as eventually things will probably stop working. It's facetagging and geotagging is still pretty great - I love being able to use google maps to tag location in a batch of photos
• I am not a fan of relinquishing my photo collection in its entirety to the cloud. Privacy aside, the automatic cataloging features of Google Photos are amazing, but if I want to change anything, I'm locked out. Have you tried tagging dates, multiple photos etc in Google Photos? You cannot manually tag faces or places either, although I suspect this will come one day. There is no transparency as to how this metadata is stored, and if I download these photos and import in MC none of that data is there.
• Scanned photos represent a problem: while I can use MC to set the dates, these are not written to EXIF. Most other programs seem to use EXIF to populate date sorting & views etc. When I import MC-tagged scanned photos into lightroom, google photos etc, they always use the scanned date, which makes organisation a mess. There are naturally other tools out there to manage EXIF tags, but this is another step which I'd love to avoid
• I'm having some strange issues with MC reconciling tag changes made between MC & Picasa (eg if a photo already has [People] tagged in MC, it will often not update to reflect XMP face tag changes from Picasa and I can't find a way around this: see here (https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,80907.msg572565.html#msg572565)) Also, sometimes when I have tagged faces in Picasa and 'updated library from tags' in MC the date will unpredictably change as well (Picasa seems to rewrite it's [Camera date] field for some reason)

Finally some threads on esoteric aspects of photo handling and tagging from the archives:

• DrKNo made some expressions to add increments of time to photos where the date was set incorrectly: Link (https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,92156)
• Raldo and a few others touched on their workflow here (https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,114687.msg793035.html#msg793035)
• Older discussions on photos/camera videos and dates, with an outstanding bug (https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,82296.msg561057.html#msg561057) affecting date handling in camera-video files
• Matt's post (https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,53434.msg365117.html#msg365117) outlining MCs handling of image tags (from 2009!)

There are a few follow-on features requests which could minimise some extra steps & confounders - eg ability to rewrite EXIF fields or better delineate what's written to where in the tagging interface. I know this has been asked for for a while, but is it something we might be able to expect in the future?

Does anybody have any suggestions, particularly in relation to workflow for scanned images? Would be interested to hear about others' image workflows too - anyone using Google Photos? Anyone still using Picasa?

Title: Re: Photos & Date Handling, Advice?
Post by: Sapagrino on August 24, 2018, 10:14:48 am

I'm interested in these same topics.  Any major advancements in refining your workflow?  Are there other facial recognition applications you've found besides Picasa?  I'd love to eventually get to where I have a MC field that allows me to tick boxes for each face in the photo.  Thanks.