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The History
Metadata is, by definition, data about other data, of any sort in any media. The purpose of metadata is to provide context for data and facilitate its understanding and management.
With the event of digital photographs, keeping and adding information about the photos within the photo files became a possibility and a standard for photo metadata was created, which most camera manufacturers use, and this standard has evolved since then to allow more information to be stored into a photo file. Together with the changes in the standards a difficulty was created, since different standards and versions of the same standard created a problem in managing metadata in a way all the applications would read, write and process the same information. It is in this scenario that this application has been developed, and it uses the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) to provide easy access to metadata using the right combination of several different standards and their versions, such as EXIF, XMP and IPTC.
Making use of the Managed Image Library the Image Metadata Manager will present the user with well formatted information without any worries about which standard to use. Also because of the library, more information than that directly provided by the WIC can be easily used.
The Possibilities
The Image Metadata Manager divides metadata into five categories:
- Description: it contains the title of the image, description, rating and copyright information
- Keywords: it contains the keywords or tags related to the image
- Date: it contains the date and time the photo was taken
- Location: it contains GPS information and location name like address, city, state and country
- Shot: it contains read-only information about how the shot was taken, i.e. exposure, aperture, etc.
- Photographer: it contains information about the photographer who took the photo
These categories cover the most common information metadata can provide and also allow the user to change that information easily for one or several images at a time. When a piece of information is modified the application ensures that all available standards will be kept and the information can be read by other applications.
The Image Metadata Manager also makes use of metadata information to perform operations on the images and their files, such as renaming files based on metadata information, rotating the images to their correct position and displaying the location where a photo was taken on a map. To see all Image Metadata Manager can do, check out the features. The application's help information is also available here.
The Author
I, Felipe Ceotto, am a developer
and photo enthusiast who likes to keep his photos organized and found no free tool
to do everything he needed. Since I don't like to have several different tools that
will overlap their funcionalities in order to be able to do what I want, I decided
to create my own tool to handle image's metadata and make it available freely.
I appreciate comments on my projects, so if you have any suggestions, comments or
if you found any problems, go ahead and contact me on
ceottaki@users.sourceforge.net.