There are many digital photography software programs today that help you organize your digital pictures. Some are called image viewers while others are called digital asset management programs. They can be free of charge or can cost hundreds of dollars to buy. How can one make sense of all these options? It is actually pretty simple because there are essentially three categories of image management programs. Read on to find out what they are.
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I was planning to write a book for a long time but it was not easy to put everything together and edit the content so that it is clear and easy to follow. Well, after many weeks of work, I was able to put it together in a beautiful PDF document that has bookmarks for easy navigation. Now, you’re the judge if it’s clear and easy to follow.
XnView is second on my list of free image viewers, after FastStone Image Viewer. I have been playing recently with Adobe Lightroom 3.0 Beta version and wanted to test compatiblity with XnView when it comes to image keywords. So, I downloaded XnView again and installed it to my computer in order to see what is new. To my surprise I noticed right away that XnView has improved its ablity to handle image metadata. Not only that XnView was compatible with Adobe Lightroom 3.0, but it gave me great insight into how the XMP framework looks like.
Is Picasa image metadata compatible with Lightroom? The short answer is yes…but. However, this short answer has to be gualified. They are compatible because of Lightroom and not because of Picasa. Or in other words Lightroom is backward compatible. Read on to see the specifics.
Last week I published the first part of the interview I conducted with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. In this section Hans talked about the current state of the image metadata standard development and in particular about the XMP standard developed by Adobe. In addition, Hans provides insight into how he organizes his own pictures on his computer. This article is the second part of the interview. 
I had the privilege to chat over e-mail with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. He was very gracious not only to answer my questions but also to provide a great history of the image metadata standards available today (EXIF, IPTC, XMP). His long history with file metadata in general and image metadata in particular makes him a great resource for a serious photographer. Hans’ great understanding of the history of modern image metadata standards provides great clarity to his vision about the field of managing unstructured data in general and image metadata in particular. This article is the first part of the interview. 
Folders and tags are two complimentary methods for organizing your digital pictures on your computer. I have written in the past about the differences and similarities of folders and tags and people have written and asked questions (Read 
I have been meaning to put together a list of image metadata terms and their definitions. I have found this list already created by the Metadata Working Group. So, I took it and published it here. Sometimes it’s easier to read a list in bullet form. I always try to define the terms before I use them and so, I believe this list is very helpful as a reference point.
Once in a while I find something on the web that makes me say: It’s about time! That’s what I found a couple of weeks ago. Image metadata and image metadata standards are very important for coming up with any meaningful long term strategy for organizing your pictures. However, with so many standards and acronyms it is very hard to figure out what to do. Do you use EXIF, IPTC or XMP for your strategy? How about all three? I believe I found a really good resource that explains the differences and commonalities between all three standards.
It is very rare for me to read about photography on blogs that have to do with computer science and programming, but this week I came across a very interesting study that combines computer science and picture organization methods. The study was done by Cornell University faculty and students and was presented at the 2009 edition of the International World Wide Web conference. It was entitled “Mapping the world’s photos” (See resources at the end for the PDF link).
As I have promised in my article about 
When photography which is an art, intersects technology which is…not an art what do you get? You get some weird buzz words. Today’s star is Geotagging ! Think of it as Geographic Tags, or Geographic keywords. The thing that makes it weird is that GeoTags are actual coordinates, so they’re not related to tags or keywords at all. They’re not keywords…’cause they’re not even words.
Now that I have explained the 
