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Sunday, November 11, 2012

Photos, Meta-Data & ITPC

I've been looking at photos on MilitaryPhotos.Net and some of them are pretty cool. I was thinking I should gather the ones I like and put them in an album somewhere on the net. I had been using Picasa, but Picasa is not doing quite what I want. I've looked at Tumblr, Flickr, and Imgur, and they all seem to have deficiencies.
    The ancient Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is the best viewer I've seen so far, but it only works on stuff on the local disk, and it doesn't do captions. It loads and unloads really fast, pretty near instantly, not like Picasa which takes a month of Sundays to set up and tear down. It doesn't clutter up the screen with a lot of nonsense, and I like the way it does scaling. If the image will fit on the screen full size, it will display it full size. If it is too large to fit on the screen, it will automatically scale it down so that it does fit, and it doesn't cover the image with any cute little controls or other fal-der-al.
    One thing I would like is to be able to use the embedded meta-data that is sometimes attached to photos. Things like date, location, identification of subject, and the name of the photographer. The website where the photo was found, or where it originated, would be a bonus. I presume most photographers would like to get credit for their photos.
    Most of the photos on MilitaryPhotos.Net have captions, and when I download them to my computer and  look at them using Picasa, sometimes those captions show up. Sometimes they don't. I can only presume some of the photos have the captions embedded as meta-data, and some don't. Now I can go through the photos using Picasa and add captions, but apparently Picasa does it in its own way, because when I upload the pics to Flickr (the only photo site I've found that handles embedded captions), the captions disappear. If I upload a photo that downloaded with a caption, it shows up.
    Looking around I eventually stumbled over this comment:
There are two forms of information stored as meta files in images that are supported by Elements.
IPTC (International Press Telecommunication Council) This is intended as a sort of reporters note pad.
EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) This is the photographers information related to all the stuff related to the camera that took the image. - Grant Dixon on clearps.com
    Since Flickr seems to be only site that handles ITPC info, I'm going to try it for a while, see if I can get the kind of display I want. We shall see how that goes. ITPC has a website, but it's not too helpful for someone who just wants to use it.
    One recent page of China photos had a bunch of really big pictures, too big for my screen. A comment said that the pictures were from Yahoo, and you could see bigger versions by clicking on the picture. How much bigger do you want? I suppose if you were willing to spend more money you could get a bigger screen, but I'm pretty happy with mine which is 1600 x 900, and it only cost $100 or so.

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