Once I started looking for tools that met the future proofing and budget - again and again I turned up empty handed.
I searched the web long and hard and tried 20 plus programs, many of which were good, but did not do what I wanted.
I became very frustrated, and made many strong comments about the hopeless state of the computer industry in general, the photo tool software industry. I mean if I was having trouble - what about "real users"!
I wondered how an "average user" had any chance of finding a tool that did not lock them into a less than adequate proprietary, inflexible method.
All the time I was also thinking to myself that I was better than "them"!
It also turns out that I did not really understand what EXIF, IPTC and XMP really are.
EXIF is a long time standard that most camera manufactures
support, although aspects of it like the detailed makernotes section allow each
manufacturer to do what they like - thus there are almost no tools that even
read this information, let alone let you make good use of it to analyse your
photos. Because the camera
manufacturers support it, most photos have EXIF metadata embedded in the photo
file by the camera when the photo is taken. But it is old and
inflexible. It has a
IPTC - turns out there are two versions of this, and changes
in the key fields that I was interested in. The older and now officially superseded
version is called
Some of the existing standards are flexible enough to allow this tagging on, some are not.
So it is starting to get complicated as due to this complexity, different photo tools support different standards and generally have limited file formats that they support (ie TIFF, JPG, some JPEG2000, and so forth).
XMP is a standard it defines overall how data is attached to the file, but does not define the tags - this is left to other standards, such as IPTC, Dublin Core and for example a number of Adobe formats for pdf and photoshop.
Some people would argue that the Adobe ways to add tags via IPTC and XMP are not standards (in the formal standard body sense), but are really a manufacturers proprietary format, that does have some (wide spread?) support.
There are yet more issues. In windows you can see many of these tags "natively" in the file system, and even set some of them and search on them. This is great - built in ability in the operating system!
However it turns out that the way in which this is done does not fully follow the "standards" and even has changed in the different versions of windows causing users and companies to loose tier tags (unless they wrote custom programs to recover the tags).
And of course in Microsoft products there is no support for the Adobe based IPTC/XMP methods.
The next version of Windows is fast approaching (well that's what Microsoft keep saying!), so what will it support. Will they make the step to support XMP, or if they do, will it be "a bit different" causing issues or what?
And I could not find any tools that also supported the Apple quicktime mov file format.
Could find information on "proposed new standards" - but these were no good - need widely implemented standards. There is a lot of really exciting work in RDF, the so called Web2 (and tags), but this is all evolving and is NOT yet supported inside the photo file, nor are their mature tools.
So, for now at least, it looks like need to focus on EXIT,
So, by now, I now felt strongly justified in HAVING to future proof my precious tags!
So by now, you can probably see that I have become fairly obsessed with finding a way to achieve my goals.
By now about eight months have passed and I was still trying, but in a dispirited fashion. Recently I had started to look at the Web2 which I had been ignoring for some time, and I discovered some sites like digg and Slashdot and diggdot.us which lead me to stumble on some more sites and programs. One site/program (I can't remember) referred to a photo asset management tool, and feeling desperate, I had a look, fully expecting that the tool would be out of my budget - but it was only a bit over and looked promising. So I started to pursue this line of search and found a few more tools.
Also about this time I bumped into some Microsoft advertising about photography in windows. Feeling very desperate, and only looking to get some information about photo workflows of professional photographers, I had a look and also got some references to more tools (I had been ignoring professional tools due to expectation that over my budget), but this too produced some promising tools around the right budget.
So at long last I have some promising tools to look at, some
of which do the same tag and search for photos, movies, and MANY other data
formats - doc, txt, pdf and so forth.
I had not dared to dream that such tools would be available for this sort
of budget. I was holding out for
My message to software companies and to the retailers is to seriously look at your advertising. While I made lots of mistakes in my searching, I had money to spend and should have been able to find products much quicker. By all means refer to product as professional and use glowing descriptions, but make sure you get the KEY functions well described (so a search will find them), don't just have a long list of details if it does not help anyone find the key aspects of what that program does.
Some times over simplification, in an attempt to show how easy a system is to use, also leads to missing key information.
My message to me - well there are lots, but the main two are if it seems obvious, then it probably is, and if you get stuck ask for help, don't just blindly keep following an approach that is not delivering!