We have thought about this, although we've not gone into great detail
about it on the wiki. XMP would be the right way to do this, as it
allows for user extensions. It would be *best* if there was a standard
way to save transformations, but one doesn't appear to exist yet and so
it would probably be up to the various projects to come together and
agree on a format.
Note that some users may want the metadata written to the original file
and not a sidecar. Sidecars also introduce the problem of conflicting
metadata -- when fields are present in both the original and the
sidecar, which has priority? (Probably the sidecar, or the mtime of
both files could be compared.)
I do think the bulk of transformations could be described in a
near-universal way. Color transformations may be the most difficult,
since the inputs are reliant on the algorithms, which may be different
from application to application. But things like crop and straighten
could be described in straightforward terms.
So, yes, this is something we've thought a lot about. If there was
some momentum to begin something like a standardization process, I know
we would definitely like to be a part of that conversation.
-- Jim
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Damien Moore <damienlmo...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi,
I see that Shotwell stores image edits in its database
http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/help/edit-nondestructive.html. Have you
guys
given some thought to how you might also store those instructions in
the
image metadata itself? (You already support this for descriptive
metadata,
of course.)
Full disclosure: I work on my own photo manager, so this isn't really
a
user support question (I do like shotwell, however, and recommend it
to
people who ask for an easy to use photo manager). I mostly ask
because I am
about to embark on implementing my own non-destructive editing process
storing the instructions (e.g. crop, rotate,
brightness/level/curve/color
adjustments) in the photo metadata or in a sidecar. It would be great
if
there were other programs doing the same thing and we could
coordinate on a
standard set of tags. I haven't seen any standards for doing this,
but I
haven't searched very thoroughly either. One option, of course, would
just
be to register an Xmp namespace for each program and each program can
then
do its own thing and do its best to import image manipulation
instructions
from other programs (the Wild West approach). I recognize that image
manipulation instructions could be interpreted differently on
different
implementations, but that's a limitation of any non-destructive
editing
process.
Keep up the good work on Shotwell!
Thanks,
Damien
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