Vista EXIF tags: someone already working on it?

[Archive]

[Originally posted by keesmoerman on 2007-01-22 18:18:03-08]

I am working with Windows Vista (Release Candidate 2) and in Vista, you can rate pictures, add tags, titles etc directly from the Windows Vista Explorer. However, in contrast with XP who uses a number of XP.... tags, Vista uses apparently his own set of tags (reading some common tags, but writing also his own), for example as set via Vista and extracted using the excellent exiftool with the -a -G1 -H options (part of output, the value 'Vista ....' filled in by me through explorer):

Code:

[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Rating                  : 3
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Rating                  : 50
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Last Keyword XMP        : Vista tag
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Subject                 : Vista tag
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Creator                 : Vista Authors
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Description             : Vista Subject
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Artist                  : Vista Authors
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Rights                  : Vista Copyright
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta Title                   : Vista Title
[XMP-xmp]            - Xmpmeta User Comment            : Vista Comments

I did not yet find anything on this in the (excellent) documentation, and seem not to be able to write/delete them eg using -XmpmetaRights=MyText. Did I miss something?

I am looking into the tags used by Vista and how it uses the standard tags, i.e. priority in reading them if multiple are filled in (like if the old XP style tags are used, or IPTC/EXIF tags), did someone already do this? I like to use those tags for image searching, but every tool seems to use its own set of tags, I'll like to write a tool to normalize them to the most commonly used ones.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-22 18:31:05-08]

Thanks for pointing this out.

It sounds like Vista has added some new XMP tag definitions.
If you could send me a sample image with all the new tags
added, I will add support for them to ExifTool.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-23 13:55:00-08]

I've managed to locate a sample of the Windows Vista XMP myself.
The XMP they are writing is non-standard in a number of ways:

1) The enclosing element is 'xmp:xmpmeta', but it should be 'x:xmpmeta' according to the specification.  This is the reason for all of the "Xmpmeta" prefixes on all the tag names, and the reason you can't write anything.

2) Vista has messed up the names and/or case of many tag ID's:

Code:

XMP-exif:  'ISOSpeed' should be 'ISOSpeedRatings'
 XMP-tiff:  'make' should be 'Make'
 XMP-tiff:  'model' should be 'Model'
 XMP-tiff:  'software' should be 'Software'
 XMP-xmp:  'creatortool' should be 'CreatorTool'

3) They use a number of tags not defined in the specification::

Code:

XMP-exif:  'ProgramMode'
 XMP-exif:  'NativeDigest'
 XMP-tiff:  'NativeDigest'
 XMP-photoshop:  'ColorMode
 XMP-photoshop:  'ICCProfile'

I will add a patch for the 1st problem, but the 2nd is a pain and I don't
know the best way to handle this.  I will also look into adding support
for the new tags of number 3.

I hope they fix some of these problems before the official Vista release.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-23 14:16:39-08]

Oops.  One of the images I was analyzing had XMP not written by
Vista (ie. the XMP was well formed).  This file contained 4 of the 5
new tags I mentioned above.  So the only new Vista tag I have seen
is:

Code:

XMP-exif: 'ProgramMode'

But I don't have many vista samples, and none where any information
has been entered via Explorer.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-23 14:35:26-08]

After more investigating, it looks like 'ProgramMode' is not a new tag,
but just an incorrect ID for an existing tag:

Code:

XMP-exif: 'ProgramMode' should be 'ExposureProgram'

So I have seen no new tags introduced by Windows Vista.  This is good, but
it would be nice if they would fix the bugs with the tags they are writing.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-23 20:23:06-08]

Thanks for the sample.  There are a few new MicrosoftPhoto XMP tags
in the sample you sent, and I will add support for them.  Also, there are
four new EXIF tags which apparently Vista is writing:

Code:

IFD0 0x4746 (int16u) - value is "3"
IFD0 0x4749 (int16u) - value is "50"
IFD0 0xea1c (1988 bytes undef) - value is "1c ea 00 00 00 08" then all zeros
ExifIFD 0xea1c (1720 bytes undef) - value is "1c ea 00 00 00 08" then all zeros

It would be nice to know what these tags mean.  It looks to me like the
first two correspond to the XMP-xmp:Rating and the XMP-microsoft:Rating
respectively, since they have the same values in the one sample you sent.

Also, the sample reveals yet another problem with the Vista meta information.
The EXIF:UserComments is encoded in Unicode but written in little-endian even
though the EXIF byte ordering is big-endian for this image.  (They can get away
with this for the Windows XP tags, but not for a standard EXIF tag.) It would be nice
if companies like Microsoft would contract out to people who actually understand
meta information structures instead of blundering along as they do with painfully
mediocre in-house programmers.  

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-24 13:36:44-08]

I've just released ExifTool 6.71
which addresses a number of these issues.  Here is the breakdown:

- Added patch for Vista "xmp:xmpmeta" unconformity

- Added patch for Vista XMP tag ID case problems

- Added patch for Vista EXIF Unicode byte ordering bug

- Added support for new XMP-microsoft tags

- Added support for 2 new Vista EXIF "Ratings" tags

- Have not yet addressed incorrect Vista XMP tag ID's "ISOSpeed" and "ProgramMode"

That's about it.  The Vista XMP implementation is really pretty much of a joke.
They need to fire the programmers responsible.  This is the worst formatted
XMP I have ever seen, aside from the blatant bugs I have mentioned, here are
a couple more "features" of the Vista XMP:

- A distinct lack of newlines in the XMP text make lines many hundreds of
characters long, which effectively defeats one design goal of XMP -- to be
human-readable.

- There is no padding before the "xpacket end" token as suggested by the XMP
specification.  While this doesn't bother me too much, the joke is that they have
added padding after the xpacket token.  In this location, the padding
is nothing more than a waste of space because here it cannot be used
as designed to provide growing room for the XMP data by an application
that does not process the rest of the file.

Just thought it may be useful for someone down the road to document all
this.  In an ideal world someone might point out this thread in a bug report
to Microsoft.  I took a quick look, but couldn't find a place to submit this
information myself.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-25 14:18:46-08]

I've managed to get some images written by Microsoft PhotoInfo on
Windows XP, and they show the same problems as we have seen
with Vista.

I have also discovered another bug in the Microsoft XMP
formatting:  The Iptc4xmpCore namespace URI written by Microsoft Photo
is "iptcCore", which isn't even a properly formed URI, and should
instead be "http://iptc.org/std/Iptc4xmpCore/1.0/xmlns/".

As well, although this is technically allowed by the XMP specification,
the namespace prefixes they use for Ipct4xmpCore are "prefix0" and
"prefix1" instead of the recommended "Iptc4xmpCore".

MicrosoftPhoto should never have been released with all these problems.

Also note that Microsoft Photo will scamble the makernotes from many cameras
when writing to an image, but this is a common problem among image editing
applications.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by keesmoerman on 2007-01-26 19:04:22-08]

Thanks (already for version 6.72), works great!!.

 
I found some more tags I could change using the properties window in Vista explorer. I now filled in all fields which could be changed from the explorer (which seems rather random: for example it is possible to set the contrast using a Vista-supplied drop-down list, however brightness is listed but not changeable, same for other fields). Most ended up in XMP-microsoft or XMP-exif fields. I've send you a normal email with this updated image.

I also changed the rating from 3 to 4 stars; this shows as:

Code:

[XMP-xmp]            - Rating                          : 4
[XMP-microsoft]      - Rating Percent                  : 75

So I guess the XM_-microsoft is a rating on a scale of 0..100% ??

I'll try this weekend to find out in which order Vista reads a number of tags (i.e. like the order -UserComment=Comment1 and -XPComment=Comment2 are treated if filled in). Might be useful for some readers.

Kees Moerman.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2007-01-26 19:55:18-08]

Hi Kees,

Thanks for the sample by mail -- it gives me a few more XMP-microsoft
tags that I will add to the next release.  Let me know if you discover any
more XMP-microsoft tags.

What I have named "RatingPercent" actually seems to have a range of
1 to 99:  Ratings of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 stars correspond to RatingPercent
values of 1, 25, 50, 75 and 99 respectively.

- Phil