Sagittarius is out!

The first aplha of the Sagittarius XMP metadata editor is out.

It can be downloaded from sagittarius.vokod.com.

Much of the planned features is still under development, but it can edit metadata 🙂

It reads and writes the XMP-IPTC metadata of jpeg,tiff,png, dng files, both in single and in batch mode.

The main window shows a directory tree and a preview on the left, photos of the currently selected directory in the middle, and XMP-IPTC meteadat on the right.

It shows a (live resizeable) preview of the currently selected photo, and displays (resizeable) thumbnails of the other photos of the directory. Beside the thumbnail it shows some basic information of the picture file (name, dimensions, size and IPTC caption. On later versions, the information displayed will be user selectable from the file properties, EXIF and IPTC tags.)

It shows all the XMP-IPTC fields of the currently selected photo (later versions will display EXIF as well)

Sagittarius does not overwrite your original files. It creates a backup copy of them (actually it is the default functionality of Exiftool, the module Sagittarius builds upon. In later versions, backing up will be user selectable).

In a separate dialog (in later versions it will be integrated to the metadata-display side panel on the right) you can edit each XMP-IPTC field of one or more photos. User can select which field to edit or leave as is.
If the user selects more than one photo, and for a certain metadata field the values are different, then a value of “Multiple values” will be shown to the user in the dialog. The only exception is the keywords (IPTC Subject) field. In the case of the keywords, Sagittaris gathers all the keywords of the selected photos. If a keyword is common (is presented in every selected photo), it will be displayed as is. If it is not common (only a few (at least one) photo has it), it will be displayed with a * as its first character. If the user does not remove the star (or the keyword), than this keyword won’t be applied to all the selected photos.

1.0 will have…

• EXIF support. I mean XMP-EXIF support. Changing of the EXIF fields will be limited to date and GPS fields (why would anybody change the other stuff anyway?).
• No metadata editor dialog boxes. Metadata edit will be done in the right side metadata panel.
• Metadata templates. User can create and apply metadata templates to batches of photos. For example, one template for copyright fields, one for creator, and so on.
• More sophisticated keyword handling. Keywords will be saved to a tree hierarchy, from what user can select which keyword to apply to photos.
• User selectable info fields in the thumbnail view. There will be up to 8lines of information beside each thumbnail. The user can select what information is to be displayed from all of the EXIF and IPTC fields, and file properties.
• For all the IPTC fields that have closed vocabularies the IPTC standard vocabularies will be implemented.

DigikamDAM

On the KDE Wiki there is an article about digital asset management with Digikam. It is quite long and covers general DAM topics as well and their realization with Digikam. From image downloading from cameras through sorting, rating, captioning, geotagging and cataloging, to archiving and backing up. It discusses the features of back-up medias and the main causes of data loss as well.

It covers both theory and practice, and is an interesting article to read, not only for Digikam users.

Part I

PartII

Sagittarius – my ExifTool GUI

A few months ago I mentioned that I was learning Python in order to write a GUI for ExifTool. Since then I abandoned Python, when encountered with mono 🙂 . Mono is the os equivalent of the .NET runtime. And I had some previous experience with c# anyway, so I decided that my ExifTool GUI will be a mono app.

I worked on it in november for a a few weeks and in the last week, and it is slowly taking shape!

Sagittarius (this is the name of the app) will focus on XMP, XMP-EXIf and XMP-IPTC to be proper.

It can load the content of a directory (yet it only can show files tha ExifTool can read and write, later I want it to be able to show files Exiftool can only read), can show thumbnails (even of raw files) , can show the metadata of a file in a notebook widget and a preview as well.

It will be able to edit multiple files (yet it can only edit a single file at a time) and to apply metadata-templates to image files. It is far from being released, but i can show you a few screenshots. Although it is on a very early stage, the code is already a mess. Well I’m not a developer. So before continuing the work on it i will rather focus on coding techniques and oo-development in general. So far it was just a try from my part, but now i really think that i will be able to finish it. I hope that in two months i will release a 0.1a. Stay tuned!

Xmp manager

A very good little piece of software is XMP manager from grigio.org.

It is a GUI to manage XMP metadata on Gnome. It is actualy a Nautilus extension. Only a few hundred lines of code, a Glade interface and exiftool, as backend. Simply, elegant, usable.

By default it only offers a few fields to edit, but what makes it more interesting, that the user can add custom fields! And it can edit multiple files.

It is an excellent tagging application! So simple, yet so powerful (exiftool can handle almost all image formats).

Writer’s block

It’s been long since my last post. I was busy with other things and, to tell you the truth, i haven’t find anything to write about.

Let me explain this a bit. When i started this blog my intention was to write about solutions. Color management was a grateful issue. The idea is simple yet the implementation is very complicated. I tried to synthesize all the information i found on the web and in books, and write a guide that has the necessary technical background, but in the same time is easily understandable. I don’t know if i succeded or not, but the articles were read quite a few times.

And that is what i tried to do with other things as well. The geotagging, and the panorama posts were not howto-s, but rather reviews or short guides. I don’t want to write howto-s or step by step tutorials for certain software, becasue i neither like to read nor to write them. Naturally i read them sometimes when i’m searching for a solution to a particular problem, but i better like to explore things myself. (Beseides, a month ago i found Joel Cornuz’s blog, who is writing excellent howto-s and application reviews reguarly, about just the same software i would write about, if i would.)

My intention was to guide the attention of the interested people to certain areas and let them find the solution that fit them best by themselves.

But on the other hand i can only write about things that interests me. The problem occured when i tried to port my workflow to linux. My former workflow consisted of theese few steps: selection, metadata-editing, developing, rating, cataloging, archiving and printing. On linux i only found a few suitable software for selecting and developing. I googled a while for finding software for the above mentioned tasks, but failed.

My cataloging and archiving method relies on metadata. When i wanted to find a certain photo, i entered a few keywords, people i was looking for, event, or whatever. So what i was looking for is a metadata-editor that focuses on IPTC and XMP, and can handle DNG files, has a gui and shows at least thumbnails. Further i was looking for a cataloging application, that is customizable, focuses on IPTC and XMP metadata, can handle DNG files. And preferably theese two shall be separate applications.

I always enter metadata to the DNG-s, to avoid editing metadata twice (for original and derivative files). This is the first step (ok, the second, after trashing the photos that worth no more than that). So i was not able to port the first step. For developing raw files and postprocessing images there are quite a lot of applications, that would go easy, if i could overcome the first problem. Cataloging would be another hard issue i fear, but i nevert tried it yet, because how to catalog if there is no metadata?

This made me so dejected, i even made fewer photos lately (and even those are undeveloped yet). I only have hope on the next release of f-Spot and Digikam. Maybe, who knows. I love linux, but from a photographers point of view, the applications available are very few. This can be well understood. Developers are making software they are interested in (in general). This is why there are image-editors and -viewers, but no asset-management, or workflow software. The latter few are mainly used by professional photographer, who are unlikely to be developers (actually, this may not be true, for i am not a professional, but i use them, and so may be a lot of other people). I think that this situation will change, and in two years (i hope) there will be both sophisticated metadata-editors as well as asset-management applications.

Currently i am learning python and pyGtk in my spare time. That is the other reason for not writing to this blog. I want to develop a GUI wrapper for exiftool. If there is no application that suits my needs, than i have to write it myself. I have some programming knowledge (not much, unfortunately), and I am curious what i will be capable of. I don’t think that it will ever be a full featured product, as my goal is to make it capable to fit in my workflow, but i will upload the source, once there will be something to upload.

If i find anything interesting meanwhile, i will post about it. Hope it will be soon.

Geotagging 2

I tried the software QLandkarte, what is a graphical application for communicating with Garmin GPS units. It’s main feature (for me at least) is that it can send and receive maps to/from devices. (Its features makes it similar to the Garmin Mapsource)

It was not easy to set it up, because 0.5.2 precompiled from getdeb was unable to send maps (feisty64 package, my system is qutsy64) although, it was working fine for a friend (feisty32 package on gutsy32). Fortunately, there is a source package (0.5.3). But be sure to install its dependencies before compiling it, because the package has no autoconf script. Works great. Its usb-protocol is based on GPSBabel, so the module problem mentioned above can be an issue here too. Can send and recieve routes, tracks, waypoints and maps.

Geotagging

I do geocaching. And naturally, i make photos during my trips. So why not connect the two? What if I could tag my photos with the coordinates they where shot on? My camera does not have a built in GPS receiver, but that is no problem.

My GPS is a Garmin hand held device, with USB port. I’ve chosen GPSBabel, as it is said to work well with Garmin devices. Unfortunately, there is a little problem with USB modules, but a solution can be found here. Just a note: I did the Ubuntu Dapper solution, and had to restart after the editing/creating of the files. No kernel recompiling was necessary.

For USB capable Garmin devices, type in the following command:

$ gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F tracklog.gpx

This will download the tracks from the GPS to a file called “tracklog.gpx”.

The EXIF metadata section of a photo holds information on the creation time of the photos (among other things), (just make shure that the clock in your camera is adjusted well), so the time stamp of every photo is to be checked against the tracklog, and if a track point with the same time stamp exists, then the coordinates of the trackpoint are to be written to the GPS section of the metadata of the photo.

This is what GPS Photo Correlate does. And it comes with a GUI too. It is capable of interpolation between trackpoints, so if the time stamps are not exactly the same, it will correlate from the coordinates of two adjacent points for the time stamp of the photos. Really easy to use. The only flaw – for me – is that it seems to be unable to write to DNG files.