UPDATE: as of today anyway, I could NOT get MS to let me download Photo Tool at:
http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/photoinfo.aspx
This seems typical MS to me, if you have something really good, take it back and offer something like Vista.
__________________________
(I wonder if this thread would be better placed in Supporting Applications)
I knew about XP Power toys, but Photo Info is new to me. There was talk on this Board some time ago regarding adding descriptions via a right click in Windows Explorer. As I recall, Jalbum could not (or didn't want to) use the information at that time. This seems similar, but much newer and seemingly offers some neat opportunities. Is it an easy program to uninstall? Any other users?
I did grab the following via a Google search although cannot say how reliable it is:
http://forum.delorme.com/viewtopic.php?p=72658&sid=269dc605218464b4bfb75c370a2de25d
John Moran_2 Joined: 09 Nov 2007 Posts: 455
PostPosted: Mon May 12, 2008 1:46 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
The "MS Pro Photo Tools - (version 1)" utility has a release date of late April, 2008. That is only a couple of weeks ago. MS claims to have put it together in only three months! It could still be considered a beta version and it incorporates a hard to read dark grey display screen.
However, it does demonstrate that Microsoft is now fully on board with supporting the Adobe/IPTC Core format of Adobe XMP 1.0 (Extensible Metadata Platform) tag embedding, as well as exposing and writing to "camera makers' Exif fields", where possible. This is quite a change from MS posture in early 2006 Vista Beta days, of acting as if they did not even understand the concept.
Microsoft has also released user friendly Windows Live Photo Gallery for Vista and XP, and it is by any definition the most comprehensive display of its type that is built around XMP metadata. Google Picasa appears to be lagging in this regard. The Newest version of Corel Media One Gallery is in its own way a quite able indexing utility, but it does not support writing of metadata to image files using XMP fields, or Exif fields except dates.. Delorme developers have hinted on these forums that a proprietary Exif Geocode embedding utility is in the works, but it has not appeared yet. Irfanview writes to the "old" Photoshop 3.0 IPTC fields also.
(cont.) As of this date it is somewhat difficult to tell what sort of proprietary photo tagging methods -embedded or external database - are used with each Photo Editor, although Wikipedia has a pretty good writeup on the subject. But photographers newly drawn to photo tagging may be as well served by using MS PhotoInfo Tool 1.0 as any other, if they are interested only in XMP tagging, but not Exif Geotagging. However MS makes the user REMOVE MS PhotoInfo Tool 1.0 in order to use MS Pro Photo Tools! Clear as mud? Search around a little bit and open a few jpegs in Notepad. It gets worse, particularly if your images are not in jpg or tiff format.
For Starters, as of May 2008, I would go with MS PhotoInfo Tool 1.0 (not the "Pro" version), and Windows Live PhotoGallery (downloads) at this time, unless I had a heavy investment in time and money in other proprietary schemes or really, really, wanted to do Exif Geocode embedding. FWIW.
JM_2
Edited by: mrag on 27-May-2008 06:49