My last post was on the first steps of my photographic workflow, namely downloading, backing up, and cconverting to DNG.
The next step is bulk metadata editing. At this point i only enter data that is relevant to all images of the session. For instance, creator and contact info, copyright terms, some keywords on the location or occasion and on people. Theese fileds are members of the IPTC metadata. For this i would need an application that can edit IPTC, and can edit the metadata of DNG files, and can show thumbnails.
Much to my amazement, I was unable to find an application on linux capable of theese three simple things. I hope that I may be wrong, and soon you will comment me some applications i have not run across so far. Both digiKam of KDE nad f-Spot of Gnome are feature-rich applications, but somwhere fail for me (f-Spot has limited metadata capabilities, and digiKam wants to copy my files to its working directory). Fortunately the next few releases of both software will contain some very useful features for me (more on the upcoming features here (f-Spot) and here (digiKam) ).
I hoped to find some GUI for the famous exifTool, but was unable (only found a windows GUI). ExifTool is so very-very powerful, especially in batch metadata editing, i really can’t understand why it has no GUI. But if I think about it, it may be a daunting work to implement only part of its functionality in a graphical way.
Well, so much, i only have a question more. Do you know about a metadata editor out there, that can handle DNG-s, knows IPTC, shows thumbnails and is capable of both single picture, and batch metadata edit?
December 2, 2007 at 3:16 pm
hi! i was annoyed by digikams photo import too – but i found a very simple solution to avoid that. just set the album library path in the settings to the folder containig the pictures. this way digicam just scans the folder and adds each subfolder as an album. this of course doesn’t allow you to have different albums in different paths, but that’s sufficient for me.
December 2, 2007 at 4:22 pm
thanks for the advice!
May 8, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Same here, haven’t still found such an application…it’s kinda sad really, due to all this RAW format war, there isn’t a standard, and so we have to “suffer” waiting for software support…if I find something out, I will let you know.
PS. After having used FSpot, Picasa, Digikam, I can safely say, I disliked all of them. I specifically hated the fact that none actually let you know that tags weren’t written inside the files (raw files). So, yea, that kinda pissed me off.
May 14, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I’m not sure I understand you well. Do you want to embed metadata into raw formats?
That is why i insist ony using dng. Cause afaik the only raw format that can have metadata embedded (ok, I know that all the raw formats have exif and makernotes, but metadata for me mostly means IPTC, what they don’t have).
June 18, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Hello vivosz,
Just to tell you that Raw Therapee 2.4m1 has now the capability to edit (write) both EXIF and IPTC in both RAW and jpeg.
Unfortunately, it’s a pity to use a RAW converter to edit metadata…
http://rawtherapee.meteoadriatic.net/rawtherapee24m1.tgz