Monday, September 24, 2007

XMP, IPTC or EXIF

I have been doing research on what options I have for supporting XMP. It is a priority for me but with the image meta data standards being so ambiguous it seems like a lot of work to take on.

So where should I store an images description: XMP, IPTC or EXIF. All three blocks I guess. What happens if when scanning an image the multiple results for a description are different, do I take the IPTC or XMP value?

In the XMP schema, I have even more options with the different schemas available. For example the Author property can potentially be stored in the following locations:

The Creator tag in the XMP Dublin Core schema:
/ifd/xmp/purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/dc:creator

The Artist tag in the EXIF schema:
/ifd/{ushort=315}

The Artist tag in the EXIF schema embedded in an XMP block:
/ifd/xmp/ns.adobe.com/tiff/1.0/tiff:artist

So I guess one option is just to reverse engineer what Windows Vista does but even the Microsoft APIs scare me: just read this!

I am currently working on a .NET version of ImageWalker (v3.0) and what I would like to do is focus on that after this release. The problem is I am not sure how long before the .NET version is releasable. Bit of a dilemma really, if the .NET version comes along quickly I will add XMP to that; if it is slow I will add it to next release of V2.3x.

Being a one man part time project makes everything slow...need to work faster!

2 comments:

Robert A. Wlodarczyk said...

Hi there! I noticed this blog post about the WIC APIs. Please take a look at the Policy Component for WIC... this document explains where metadata is placed in a file in Windows Vista: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb643802.aspx

Also, please take a look at my blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/rwlodarc) for additional resources and samples. Of interest may be the InPlaceBitmapMetadataHandler post.

Gunar said...

Have you checked out the XMP SDK? I am the product manager for XMP at Adobe - I would like to hear your feedback.

Gunar

(Contact me offlist at gunar at adobe dot com)