MemoryMiner

One of the top user requests I’ve seen is to be able to embed the metadata (aka descriptive information) that MemoryMiner creates into the actual photo file itself. For some time now, MemoryMiner has done a great job of using embedded IPTC metadata to automatically create People and Places as well as set dates, titles and captions.

Here’s a link to a screen movie demonstration:

http://memoryminer.com/help/video_gallery.html#IPTCImport

In MemoryMiner 2.0, metadata which you create, including the all important Selection Markers used to indicate where a person is a picture, can now be optionally written into the file itself. This is done using a plugin, which uses the Adobe XMP toolkit to write the metatdata using the XMP specification, as well as the “classic” EXIF/IPTC specifications. Thanks to the fact that XMP is extensible, we could define our own namespace (namely ““) in order to describe our selection markers in a way that it easy for other applications to understand.

Storing metadata in the file is fantastic for a couple of reasons. The first, is that it means the work you do in MemoryMiner exists in a format that is completely independent of the MemoryMiner application’s file format (which is based on the open source SQLite database, by the way). The second is that the data travels with the file and can be used to good effect in dozens of other applications and services such as Adobe Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, Flickr, and many others. Third, it makes it a breeze to transfer the annotation work done on one or more images from one MemoryMiner library to another.

I look forward to getting feedback from some of the early testers, I’m sure it’s going to be really well received.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.