Metadata writing

[Jibz]

I was playing around with tagging images today because I could see the benefit in being able to do that part of the workflow from within Daminion.

 

I ran into a couple of issues though:

 

Firstly, for a part of my collection I would prefer to only write IPTC tags to the files. I selected the option under properties to write EXIF/IPTC tags, but Daminion still writes XMP as well. I have a number of older images which are fairly small JPEG files, and quite frankly I don't want to add megabytes of superfluous XMP data to those. Could there be an option to only write EXIF/IPTC?

 

Secondly, I noticed that Daminion writes its own name all over the metadata. In the EXIF Software field, the IPTC Originating Program field, and the XMP Creator Tool field. It even overwrites the original values in these fields!

 

I had a file created with Paint.NET which logically had "Paint.NET v3.5.10" in the EXIF Software field. I added the image to Daminion and it imported that field, correctly showing it in the General section of the Properties tab. I then added a copyright message in that field, and synced the metadata back to the image. Now, the Daminion database still had the original Software field entry, so that was showing in the Properties tab, but checking the image file on disk, it now had Daminion in the EXIF Software field (and in the IPTC and XMP). This, in my personal oppinion, is not ok.

[Murat]

I was playing around with tagging images today because I could see the benefit in being able to do that part of the workflow from within Daminion.

 

I ran into a couple of issues though:

 

Firstly, for a part of my collection I would prefer to only write IPTC tags to the files. I selected the option under properties to write EXIF/IPTC tags, but Daminion still writes XMP as well. I have a number of older images which are fairly small JPEG files, and quite frankly I don't want to add megabytes of superfluous XMP data to those. Could there be an option to only write EXIF/IPTC?

 

Switching off support for XMP format will complicate the metadata handling logic. XMP has priority over IPTC and EXIF format, so if will switch it off and you will write information into the IPTC, you might loss the information when reading the metadata back to the Daminion.

 

Usually XMP blocks are not so big, and takes less than ~5-10Kb.

 

Secondly, I noticed that Daminion writes its own name all over the metadata. In the EXIF Software field, the IPTC Originating Program field, and the XMP Creator Tool field. It even overwrites the original values in these fields!

 

This could be added optionally. Thanks for the note!