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[rendier]

Hi all,

does Media Center understand IPTC metadata in jpeg images?  It is a standard used by a number of software packages to store keywords, annotations etc. 

If not, are there plans to support it?  I've annotated alot of images with data in this format, and the data now goes with the image wherever it goes, but I don't see it in Media Center.

Thanks in advance
reinier

[Matt]

Current IPTC is not supported.  Unfortunately, it's not very flexible so it can't store all the information we need to store.

We may add support in a future version.

[glynor]

I know I've made this case before, but if MC supported read/writing of these tags it would help me greatly.  So, basically, I wanted to reiterate my me too on this.

[rendier]

From what I've seen of the IPTC stuff, it does enough (everything I need).  Maybe it is possible to store a subset of MC's tags in the IPTC (and great if you can select which subset), and the whole lot in MC's metadata.  Then everybody wins . . .

The great thing about IPTC is that the data is in the image itself, it travels with the image, and it is a standard, so a lot of other programs can read it (Flickr, Picasa, Gallery, Photoshop, etc)

There's even libraries to read/write this, so it shouldn't be too hard to add.

So, is there any way to bump the priority?

[glynor]

I would guess that this is something that they will probably look at with the next major version (version 12).  They are just now finishing up a big update to the current version (bringing it to 11.1), and I doubt you'd see any movement before then.

The big issue I think the developers have with the IPTC tags isn't about what can be stored in them, but how that data needs to be stored (performance issues).  This is rampant speculation on my part, but from the past statements by Matt and JimH on this issue, it's probably either that or something similar.

If so, I would like to see MC at a minimum read the IPTC data on import (and manually through Update Library From Tags with a Use IPTC option maybe).  IPTC writing support would also be very useful for me (mainly so Adobe's applications and enterprise-level Digital Asset Managment systems could use data "tagged" through MC) though if performance were an issue, it would NOT need to be connected to the standard "Update Tags when File Info Changes" option.  I would be perfectly happy with some method to manually sync IPTC data back out to the image files if it was very slow.

For now, Image management in MC definitely feels "second class" to the power of it's handling of Music and Video files.  Hopefully, along with the promised video improvements and network server improvements, this will be a focus of version 12!   

[Cmagic]

Hi Matt,

Current IPTC is not supported.  Unfortunately, it's not very flexible so it can't store all the information we need to store.

We may add support in a future version.

As for implementing a standard flexible metadata system for images, XMP is the way to go in 2006. In fact the IPTC standard is about to be deprecated in favor of XMP. The latest version of image managers (Adobe Bridge, Iview Media, Portfolio, Imatch, Idiimager, Pixvue, etc..) now support XMP. The nice thing is that XMP is an extensible xml based metadata system (like JTMC image metadata MJMD) and that it is compatible with EXIF and IPTC using the IPTC4XMP schema.http://www.iptc.org/IPTC4XMP/

So, Matt, If you are considering supporting a standard image metadata in a future version, you should better look toward XMP IMHO.

Christian

[Matt]

Thanks for the info.

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

[glynor]

Actually, I hadn't really thought about that, but XMP support (even instead of true IPTC support) would satisfy me as long as MC could read IPTC tags on import.   

[Cmagic]

Glynor,

Once you support XMP, the only thing to do is to instantiate the iptc4xmp core schema in the xmp framework and you can read all existing legacy IPTC tags.
You can even create a JRiver schema for tags specifics to MC (images, video, audio). In fact I used an XMP aware application to build my own xmp schema (cmagic:xmp) for my images at work and Rock'n Roll !

It's even more flexible than APE for audio files

Christian