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!
Just for your information, iPhoto comes close to your requirements. * Archive-able - Backup the iPhoto Library folder * Preservable - Restore the folder * Cross-platform - No * Vendor-neutral - possibly with some simple import scripts iPhoto stores very little in the EXIF data in your file, but the meta data is available in quite a few different ways inside your folder. * XML - Look in the AlbumData.xml and AlbumData2.xml These connect your albums and such to images. * Binary plist - easily convertable to XML, Look into Metadata Backup folder * SQLite database - Look into iPhotoMain.db which contains a whole lot of data about your images. Personally I doubt that there will ever be a single standard for storing meta data about your photos. Especially since this meta data will always be dependent upon the features of the software you use. IMHO, the best you can do is to make sure your meta data is exportable or accessible in some way. --lonnie /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
