Re: Meta-Data Import

[David Moore <dcm MIT EDU>]

Rather than add this kind of import feature into f-spot, my feeling is
that it would be more appropriate to write a tool that would write the
metadata directly into an XMP or IPTC header in the image.  Then f-spot
will automatically see the metadata.

In fact, since you are generating this XML from somewhere, and XMP is
XML-based, you might as well just generate the XMP directly rather than
put it through an intermediate format.

I'd like to see the various photo applications get away from having a
central metadata database at all.  I feel that they should use the image
data as the authoritative database and generate a cache as necessary for
fast performance.  But upon deleting the cache, switching applications,
reinstalling the OS, moving to a difference machine, etc., all metadata
will seamlessly remain because the image files themselves are the
repository.  Maybe such a philosophy is already in mind for f-spot, but
I haven't had much success pushing gthumb in that direction.

The main drawback of such an approach is that some people don't like
touching the original image file for any reason whatsoever.  In that
case (or for formats that don't allow embedded XMP such as RAW), the XMP
data can be stored in a separate file alongside each image.  An
important aspect of this approach is that there is only one image per
XMP file so that it can be copied anywhere the image goes.

Anybody have any thoughts?

Regards,

David

On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 16:41 -0400, Warren Baird wrote:
> Gabriel Burt wrote:
> > I don't know of anybody working on that.  You might look at my gThumb
> > metadata import patch (sent to the list a few weeks ago) if you need
> > help getting started.
> 
> Ok - I've written up a brief description of what I want to do.   I might 
> start implementing it this weekend - since I'm quite interested in 
> getting my photos and metadata off my ibook and into F-spot.
> 
> Any feedback would be very welcome.  If I don't get any feedback in the 
> next day or so, I'll add an enhancement request for it to bugzilla.
> 
> 
> The goal of this addition is to allow the easy importing of arbitrary 
> image metadata - primarily categories and ratings - from other programs 
> into f-spot.   The general approach will be to create an xml file 
> describing the metadata to be added to each photo - and to add an 
> 'Import Metadata..." option to f-spot that parses the XML, tries to find 
> the appropriate photo(s) and add the metadata to it.  The xml data will 
> look like this:
> 
> <photos>
>    <photo name="IMG_1938.jpg" date="March 10, 2006">
>      <category> San Francisco </category>
>      <category> /people/Fred </category>
>      <category> /Events/MacWorld/Mac World 2006 </category>
>      <rating> 5 </rating>
>    </photo>
> </photos>
> 
> The name attribute on the photo element is required - the date is 
> optional.   If multiple images with a matching name exist, and a date is 
> specified, then each specified date matches any of the images with a 
> same name, the metadata is applied to the first such matching image 
> found.  If multiple images have the same name and date - it is arbitrary 
> which image is selected.
> 
> When a matching photo is found, the list of category subelements is 
> processed - for each category we first try to find an existing category 
> or tag. - if the first character is the category name is a '/', then any 
> internal '/' characters are used to separate parent categories from 
> children categories - so "/Events/MacWorld/Mac World 2006" would look 
> for a top level category "Events" with a child category "MacWorld", 
> which has a child category or tag "Mac World 2006".  If the categories 
> or tags don't exist , they are created.
> 
> Category names without a leading '/' are treated as single names, even 
> if there is an internal '/' - so "Burning Man / Black Rock City" is 
> treated as a single 'relative' category name.   When a relative category 
> name is encoutered, the import process checks to see if it can find an 
> existing category or tag with that name, anywhere in the Category tree - 
> if it can, the first one it finds is used.   If no matching categories 
> or tags are found anywhere, then a new category is created as a child of 
> the top-level Category "Imported Tags" - which is created if it doesn't 
> exist.
> 
> If a 'rating' sub-element is found, it is assumed to contain an integral 
> value, and a rating of that many 'stars' is applied to the photo.
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