Comments on: “Truth is in the file” redux: From Photo Gallery to Flickr

By: “It won’t repro” « Jon Udell

“It won’t repro” « Jon Udell — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:30:31 +0000

[...] Filed under: Uncategorized — Jon Udell @ 8:30 am In a comment on an item last month about Photo Gallery, Mary Branscombe writes: I’m having an issue at the moment where [...]

By: Mary Branscombe

Mary Branscombe — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:17:30 +0000

I’m having an issue at the moment where renaming a file in Windows Live Photo Gallery seems to reset the date on the file so WLPG sees a file from May 2006 as having been taken today. Has anyone else seen this? Changing the name also loses my tags and confuses WLPG so it can’t upload it to flickr… All JPEGs.

By: Tony

Tony — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 18:05:15 +0000

Read section 4.2.3 in the PNG spec on chunks at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Chunks.html and you can see that it is possible to store arbitrary textual data inside a PNG image.

By: Erwyn van der Meer

Erwyn van der Meer — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:29:50 +0000

Yes, matching pictures into pairs based on date and time taken works well for me.

Sometimes the date and time taken is incorrect. E.g., if you forget to set the right timezone on your camera and correct the EXIF information after you upload your images to Flickr. If the datetime taken goes out of sync, the matching will not work.

But with help from Timo Proescholdt I am working on improving the matching algorithm in my app.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:32:03 +0000

“the FlickrMetadataSynchr application”

I was going to ask how you match up the images, but here is the answer:

“Match pictures into pairs based on date and time taken”

Works well, I gather?

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:27:10 +0000

“Its a perm-debate within Flickr.”

Understandably. These are deep philosophical waters. Thanks for your reply, and thanks for helping to make this cool thing happen.

By: Erwyn van der Meer

Erwyn van der Meer — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:58:12 +0000

Before I embarked on creating the FlickrMetadataSynchr application, I wrote a blog post on this metadata problem: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/erwyn/archive/2007/02/01/digital-workflow-for-flickr.aspx

This post also links to my original inspiration. The Golden Rule of Metadata: Store the metadata in your images: http://www.topxml.com/XML/re-41523_Open-Source-Image-Archiving–Exif-IPTC-XMP-and-all-that-XML.aspx

By: Erwyn van der Meer

Erwyn van der Meer — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:51:13 +0000

I’ve created an application that allows you to sync metadata for your pictures on Flickr with the local (original) files on your hard disk. It is called the “Flickr Metadata Synchr” and it synchronizes: title, description, tags, author and geo-location.

Check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/FlickrMetadataSynchr – It is a free (as in beer), GPL open sourced application that runs on .NET 3.0.

By: kellan

kellan — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:58:36 +0000

We don’t embed the tags in the photos because we assume you would want to download the original (largest size) version of the photo if you were making a local backup, and we never modify the original. Its a perm-debate within Flickr.