Tim Grey’s Blog

I was checking out the latest news from Photokina (which I opted not to go to in order to finish up the latest book — you’re welcome, Deke), and ran across an item that gave me some hope.

You see, not too long ago I was testing some things out in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. As it happened, I was able to assign different keywords to the same image with each application, and have them show up differently in each application.

I know, this sounds crazy. But it’s true. In Bridge there would be one set of keywords for a given image, and in Lightroom there would be a different set of keywords. Ouch.

This got me thinking a lot about the challenges of metadata. They’re not trivial. There are many standards, many more software applications that attempt to implement those standards, and basically a lot of disagreement about how metadata should be handled.

For the photographer, this isn’t good. I mean, we need to be able to trust our metadata, right?

Well, a new industry consortium gives me hope. Yes, you read that right. “industry consortium” and “hope” appeared in the same sentence — a sentence written by me.

But it’s true. The consortium is called the Metadata Working Group. It was proposed by Microsoft (feel free to groan, and claim I’m biased because I used to work there, but then read the details at the website and decide for yourself). It includes Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia, and Sony. And yes, I did just put Apple and Microsoft in the same sentence. The issue of metadata is so important that they’re working on this together, which is cool.

Anyway, it is probably no surprise to photographers that metadata is — in many ways — broken. I applaud these companies for getting together to do something about it, and am hopeful it will lead to improved specifications that will be implemented by all the companies involved (and more) to make life better for photographers.

Metadata deserves respect, after all. Thanks guys.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Software, Digital, Announcement. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.