GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 94416
Making GIMP XMP/IPTC- aware
Last modified: 2006-05-20 22:42:45 UTC
Image files that are annotated with IPTC data loose that data when brought into GIMP, edited, and saved. Is there any effort to make GIMP more XMP/IPTC aware and prevent the loss of IPTC image file annotation data? It would be even better if GIMP had the functionality to present and edit XMP/IPTC data. Thanks, Eric
This is related to the following bug reports: - bug #56443 "Add support for EXIF or TIFF/EP data (in JPEG, TIFF and PNG formats)" - bug #61499 "easy way to view/edit image parasites (author, copyright, image title, etc.)" The XMP and IPTC formats are different from EXIF. The XMP format (Extensible Metadata Platform) is an XML-based (or RDF-based) metadata format defined by Adobe in September 2001. It is supported by all recent Adobe products, such as Photoshop 7, Acrobat 5, Illustrator 10, etc. It is also supported by several other products, especially by content management systems. This is described on this page: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html Note that XMP is a trademark of Adobe, but they allow third-party products to be described as "XMP-compatible". There is an SDK available on this page (for Windows and Mac only): http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/xmp/main.html The IPTC format is also known as IIPTC-NAA Information Interchange Model, sometimes written as IIM or IIMv4. It is available for download, but requires a registration: http://www.iptc.org/site/standards.html A subset of this specification was used by Adobe to define the metadata for Photoshop 7. It is supported by several other applications such as ACDSee, IrfanView, PixVue, etc. I found an excellent page that compares the various metadata formats and gives a summary of what they support (including the list of tags from IIMv4 used in XMP/IPTC): http://peccatte.karefil.com/Software/Metadata.htm Unfortunately, this page is in French but it is very useful if you understand French. For example, they give some suggestions about what metadata should be stored in EXIF format (basically, all metadata that can be generated automatically) and what metadata should be stored in IPTC (everything that requires human input). Note that supporting XMP/IPTC is more complex than supporting EXIF (bug #56443) because XMP requires an RDF parser so we would need more than the "flat" structure provided by the current GIMP parasites. We should probably store the XMP/IPTC data in a single GIMP parasite and have a specific plug-in (as described in bug #61499) for editing this metadata. The XML+RDF parser could then be included only in the parasite editor (available from "Image->Properties" or a similar menu entry).
*** Bug 98828 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 100221 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Changes at the request of Dave Neary on the developer mailing list. I am changing many of the bugzilla reports that have not specified a target milestone to Future milestone. Hope that is acceptable.
Since a few months, the XMP specifications are available from Adobe as a separate file that does not require downloading the full XMP SDK (and agreeing to its license agreement). Here is the link to the file: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/pdfs/xmpspec.pdf As mentioned in bug #61499, the support for editing XMP metadata (which obsoletes IPTC) may be available soon.
Just a note to explain the importance.. Many photo agencys, newspapers and the programs they use requires that images they buy from photographers have IPTC data. Much of their image handling depends on it. As a photographer, many times i can't sell my photos without it (unless i am a very known and high profile photographer, then they may do it for me with PS or whatever). So, to make Gimp an alternative for a professional or semi-pro photographer, this functionality is mayny times absolutley neccesary (depending on his agent). Some may say -well, change to a better agency then. But it does not work that way, the agencys have their photographers, and they do not take on new ones just like that. Some of them are very picky about hwo they choose, and if that guy even can't deliver files with the correct IPTC... well, goodbye.
Don't worry, we are aware of the importance of handling metadata correctly. I am working on a metadata viewer/editor for the GIMP and it should be ready in a couple of weeks. If you want to check the work-in-progress, you can have a look at this page: http://wilber.gimp.org/~raphael/metadata/ By the way, I hope that your agency accepts to process images with IPTC data written in XMP (default since Photoshop 7 and Photoshop CS) and not the old (proprietary) format used by Photoshop 6 and earlier, because I am only planning to support metadata output in EXIF and XMP formats unless there is a strong need for other formats. I will try to support the old format as input, though.
I lift my hat off :-) It looks promising. [irony]Many photo agencys go to PS church every sunday so what the latets PS uses must be what everybody should be using and they hurry to adopt[/irony]
thank you raphael for your develompment :-) i'm a profesional photographer too, and i'd like to add my voice to the need for IPTC viewer/editor ( especially... for batch-writing same IPTC meta data to several pictures )
I'm glad to read that IPTC support is in the works. I work for a metro daily newspaper that is beginning to embrace open source and is very good about donating to open source projects that it adopts. IPTC support is essential in our database workflow. I've been working with GIMP on the Mac and find it excellent. I'll be keeping a close eye on progress.
maybe this can help : i use an excellent IPTC lib project called exiv2 you might want to use http://home.arcor.de/ahuggel/exiv2/ and also... this lib can help too : http://libiptcdata.sourceforge.net/
*** Bug 307282 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Setting milestone to 2.4 because we absolutely want the metadata editor to be available with 2.4.
Maybe we should simply mark this bug report as a duplicate of bug #61499, because the metadata editor that I am working on (when I have time...) includes support for XMP and for the IPTC Core schema for XMP (IPTC4XMP). On the other hand, the import and conversion from the "old" IPTC format (binary tags) to the new IPTC Core (XMP) is not implemented yet as this has a rather low priority, so maybe we can wait until that part is implemented before closing this bug report.
Marking as duplicate on the basis of comment #14 -- no sense having two bug reports that are pointing to the same solution. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 61499 ***