Re: Meta-Data Import

[Bengt Thuree <bengt thuree com>]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 13:37 -0400, David Moore wrote:
> 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,
> 

I definitely want to have ONE (1) file with all the image data including
the image itself. Otherwise it will be major problems further down the
track when you have missplaced the external database or you can not use
it or whatever.
This is one of the major features that have kept me with F-Spot for the
past years. (Still waiting for it to be completely implemented though)

/Bengt