Requested IPTC Core, IPTC Core Extension & XMP

[LINKn8r]

First, I want to say I love Irfanview. It is a very lightweight, powerful tool that I use quite often.
Is there a plan to support the IPTC Core, IPTC Core Extension, & XMP? I mean, above and beyond the IIM from the early nineties that is supported. It would be awesome to have this tool support those new fields and shemata.

In my case, I do a lot of genealogy work, so knowing and archiving WHO is the picture is most useful. The IPTC Core Extension written in July 2009 has the perfect field for this (PersonInImage). While I can survive by using the keywords field and captions field, it is not best-practice. The field is out there and available to use now, I just don't yet have a tool to view/edit it. XMP seems to becoming the defacto standard for interacting with the fields.

For now, I will continue to use Irfanview to set the captions and keywords of people's names. Subsequently, I can then use ExifTool to read the keywords field and then write this to the PersonInImage field - even though I cannot view the information in Irfanview.

Thoughts?

Thanks Much!

[Sam_Zen]

I think any method to add more relevant data to a picture is worth to consider.

[Silversleeves]

Yes, let's get IrfanView out of its metadata "cloud," shall we?!

It's about time something was done on this score.

I just spent twenty minutes annotating and re-annotating one JPEG file (that tested as not corrupt in exiv2, Photoshop and XnView). Of the 8 IPTC tags to which I added data in the file, IrfanView read in none of them, and displayed no more than the file name and its index number in full-screen slideshow mode -- when I had the seven out of eight IrfanView is capable of reading in the first place, set to be displayed.

More often than it ought to happen, IrfanView fails to read in the IPTC tags written to a file by MS Expression Media 2. Though from what I've read here on the Forum, other applications from Digikam in Linux all the way to Photoshop CS3 get their tag data ignored by Irfan's flagship project.

So if it means rolling in more opensource code, then what are we waiting for?

And while you're at it, dump LuraTech and pick up some likewise workable GNU code for JPEG2000's.

BZT

[MItaly]

And while you're at it, dump LuraTech and pick up some likewise workable GNU code for JPEG2000's.

I'm already working on it, but I don't have much time, and the various open source libraries are still quite immature. I'm using OpenJPEG, which seems to me the best one, but it is now in a transition moment, the new version 2 could address many problems I have now with the 1.3 SVN, but they are starting to work seriously on it exactly in this period.

[Silversleeves]

So we'll wait till everything's ready.

Speaking for myself alone, I'm reasonable and flexible enough to seek out/use other editors for making JPEG2000 files from files in other formats. It's no big deal -- but I think you'll agree, a pay-to-use utility couched in an otherwise free application is something of an anachronism.

My greater annoyance is the lack of truly comprehensive IPTC editing and display capabilities. I am finding myself switching over to XnView and other applications to test out slideshow ideas more often now than ever before, sometimes simply to see if a tag I've not often used before is actually being written to files by the command-line tools I use.

As much for myself as for those professionals who find IrfanView fairly useful and want to see it increase in calibre, some work in earnest should be done on this front and very soon. How long are these "EXIF this" and "IPTC that" threads? What are the dates on the original posts? There's your testimony to how much people who enjoy using IrfanView and admire Irfan and the other maintainers for keeping it going, keeping it current and keeping it free, want (and sometimes need) to see these changes made.

And if someone at this point were to point out that the second half of the name IrfanView is "View" not "Edit," my reply would be something along the lines of "Irfan himself opened this Pandora's box by adding whatever few edit functions, visible or meta-visible, there already are to the application in the first place. Now that the horse is out of the stable, the other coders and maintainers want to bar the door and add no more? What does Irfan himself say?"

Off the soapbox.

BZT