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.
PHOTOBUNTU - photo management on linux 
April 12, 2008 at 10:23 am
Are you planning to implement geotagging support? If so, you can do it as Digikam had it: implemented with the Google Maps API.
April 12, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Actually, geotagging is unlikely to be implemented until 1.0. If berlios.de worked, you would be able to see my planned roadmap to 1.0
I don’t say that this is carved to stone and cannot be changed, but other things (metadata templates, hierarchical keyword sets) inspire me more at the moment. But if i get more request on geotagging support, i may think it over.
April 15, 2008 at 10:15 am
Are you planning to make deb package for ubuntu ?
April 15, 2008 at 10:31 am
Well, I don’t plan to make deb package, because i don’t know how to do it.
But installing from source is very simple (the usual ./configure, make, make install stuff), the dependency list is short, there shall be no problem with it (if you have f-spot installed for instance, it is likely that you have all the Sagittatius’s dependencies installed already).
The only catch is Exiftool itself, cause it shall be installed separately. Fortunately there is a deb package for Exiftool.
April 21, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Sagittarius 0.2 is out!
The second release of Sagittarius is ready. Among the new features are EXIF (read-only) support.
Seee the release notes:
http://sagittarius.berlios.de/index.php?page=release-notes
for more information
May 7, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Wonderful – I will need exactly this tool (together with Lightzone) for a museum’s collection of photographs (and my few own images). Many thanks!
May 7, 2008 at 12:46 pm
To kewerner
I really hope that you will find it useful, although it is far from being very user-friendly. But comments like this can speed up my work 🙂
I have just released the second revision of 0.2 today. It is much faster than 0.1 or 0.2, and consumes much less memory.
All the best
May 20, 2008 at 3:59 pm
this seems like a great idea. Some questions:
What about editing user-defined XMP fields?
Windows version?
Support for Nikon RAW files?
Thanks
May 22, 2008 at 6:26 am
To Phil
User defined XMP fields: surely won’t be supported until sagittarius 1.0. After that, i don’t know. Maybe.
Windows version: Sagittarius uses the gtk toolkit. And gtk runs under windows as well. But i never examined sagittarius under windows. I know mono apps can be run on windows, maybe if you would give it a try (installing mono runtime and gtk on win) and share your discoveies, i would appreciate it. I like the idea of running Sagittarius on windows, but its priority is quite low at the moment.
Support for NEF files. Well, hat would need some testing. AFAIK NEF is a proprietary modification of the tiff standard, and this means that theoretically it can have xmp metadata embedded. If not, even than it can have xmp metadata in a sidecar file.
I don’t know much about NEF (I’m a Minolta/Sony user) unfortunately.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but none of the features you asked about is likely to be implemented until 1.0, if ever.
But, I will move the Sagittarius website to a new place (sagittarius.vokod.com) soon, and will give it a better website, with better means for getting user feedback. If i will be overpowered by feature-requests, priorities can change.
September 26, 2008 at 8:38 am
Hi vivosz,
I am wondering whether it would be possible to create exif metadata in TIFF or PNG images, that do not have them. (Exiftool man page says that writing, but not creation is possible.)
The reason I am asking is that GIMP tiff and png plugin do not save Exif, so I need to add them separately (e.g. from JPEG or RAW files).
October 21, 2008 at 11:07 am
I found it through this website. It should be noted that vivosz has abandoned development.
I tried out the program but terminated it immediately after i saw it change my images just loading the pictures. Just loading the pictures had an impact on the filesize of the JPGs and i have no idea what was changed. This makes me concerned… look into jhead or other similar tools.
October 21, 2008 at 11:16 am
To Frederik:
In the case of files not having an XMP metadata section (only EXIF and/or IPTC) Sagittarius creates the XMP section automatically on the first load and copies all the information from EXIF/IPTC to XMP (leaving the former two untouched).
If set, a backup copy of the files in question is made.
Loading theese files a second time won’t alter their sizes, as there is already an XMP section, and it won’t be created.
Worth a note that when Sagittarius saves metadata it not only saves XMP, but synchronizes EXIF and IPTC sections to XMP as well.
April 24, 2009 at 12:51 pm
https://launchpad.net/digiwf
DigiWf+Nautilus also processes XMP.
It supports geocoding.
October 17, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Hey man!! What is going on?? I’m waiting for your posts, which are amazing!!
Come back to work, the community is prayying for you…
July 30, 2011 at 12:47 am
I’d like to add my name or my site in the “author” field. I didn’t know it was so hard to write an app that let you modify exif datas.
September 12, 2011 at 6:45 am
http://download.tuxfamily.org/xcfaudio/Sagittarius/
September 12, 2011 at 6:48 am
Hey, thank you! 🙂
September 14, 2011 at 11:44 am
It really seems a good initiative.. but it breaks upon my double click on a folder..