Would you like to exchange your collections of meta-tagged images?

[jbionic]

Hi there,

Unfortunately the forum doesn't have the in-built option allowing to conduct an opinion poll. But I am hopeful that the topic may spark some interest with responses from the participants.

I guess many of exiftool's users may have collected a number  of meta-tagged images and started to wonder if there is a way to search in other people's collections and so to exchange.

The nature of metadata is rather shaky, because there is currently no way to ensure 100% the validity of meta-tags and their match with the content of images. A picture portraying a pet may be tagged as "lion" or "planet Jupiter", which brings up the issue of potential fakes. So if one wants to search other people's collections, trust must be instilled to make it all more idiot-proof and to avoid fakes by limiting the number of participants.

On the other hand, the content of images could be anything, including screenshots from a new book that's just come out, a figure from an electronic paper that can be only accessed by purchasing, or simply photos from a posh magazine. This means that the content can be subject to copyright claims, so anonymity of participants in the process of exchange is crucial too.

The above two features limit the scope of possible technical solutions by peer-to-peer networks supporting both F2F and metadata. Of the P2P solutions that I'd know only GnuNet and RetroShare seem to have both. This brings us one step closer to what is commonly called as the DarkNet, which may spook an unexperienced user  That's why I am curious about what other people think of this?

I would appreciate any comments at this stage.

[Phil Harvey]

I've enabled polls in the forum.  Click "Add Poll" button to create a poll.

- Phil