I intend to tackle this problem myself in the not too far off future. My primary concern is reading and organizing data so I've outsourced development for a meta-data reader that can easily interface with any language via JSON i.e. JavaScript (Node.JS), Go, Ruby, Python MediaTags: https://github.com/coolaj86/mtags
If you'd like to donate, I'd very much appreciate it and I'd be willing to match your donation towards write support. I would have thought that in the past 10 years someone would have created a viable media server, but since all of the petty attempts by HP, Apple, and even Google have failed miserably, I'm going to go for it myself. AJ ONeal On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 12:24 AM, Richard Esplin <[email protected]>wrote: > How do you label and organize your photos in an archive-able, preservable, > cross-platform, vendor-neutral way? > > My mother spent an significant amount of time sorting and tagging her > lifetime of family photos using Adobe Elements Organizer. When her Windows > got pooched, I convinced her to get a Mac. We bought Adobe Elements for OSX > and copied the files over. Unfortunately it was an object lesson in the > evils of proprietary software: the data she entered was in some binary > format that nothing else could read. Including Adobe Elements for the Mac! > All that time was wasted! > > (It turns out that we should have been regularly running "File > Write Tag > Info To Files", but it is a little late now!) > > This seems like an obvious shortcoming in systems that store information > about a file somewhere besides in the file itself. This blog post from 2006 > does a good job explaining the problem. > > > http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2006/08/24/open-source-image-archiving-exif-iptc-xmp-and-all-that/ > > Unfortunately, things have not improved much in the last 4 years. > > I can't seem to get Mac Finder to display comments made by Picassa, so I > don't think Picassa is storing it in metadata. Though it will display > comments made in iPhoto, Picasso won't, so I don't think iPhoto is using > metadata either. > > I recently learned that imagemagick has a command "identify -verbose" which > displays all the metadata in a photo (is there anything imagemagick can't > do?). I was able to use it to verify that the KDE tools like Dolphin and > Gwenview don't store their comments or tags in the file's metadata. Their > system is so fragile that any time I edited the actual metadata, KDE forgot > about any comments already put on the file. Beware lest ye waste yer time > with this fragile joke of a solution! > > Next time I'm on OSX I'll need to install imagemagick to verify what iPhoto > and Picassa are doing with the files. > > I did, however, find two tools that appear to work: > > * jBrout > http://jbrout.manatlan.com/index > Simple, straightforward, and works great on Linux. Looks like it will be a > pain to install the dependencies on OSX. > > * Digikam > http://digikam.org > Available on OSX via Macports. Like Adobe, it wants to creates a database > by default and not store information in the metadata of the image files. But > it has a setting where it will always keep the database and metadata in sync > (theoretically). Of course, it warns the user to never use the setting > because of the performance implications. How very short-sighted. > > Any suggestions? > > Thanks, > > Richard > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
