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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Sunday, January 28, 2007

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Warning to you if you used Microsoft Digital Image Suite and upgrade to Vista

Microsoft Digital ImagingIf you ever used any of the Microsoft Digital Image Suite products to add keywords or captions to your photos and you plan to use Vista you are in for a surprise.

Digital Image Suite writes keywords and captions to proprietary EXIF tags and not the IPTC fields that most software (Picasa, Adobe Applications, iPhoto etc) use. The field in question is EXIF Property Tag ID 40094 which is a Unicode String.

However, Digital Image Suite does read those fields just fine.

So say yo have a photo. Now you've added a bunch of keywords to those photos in the past. But you stopped using Digital Image Suite and started using a different program that writes them to the IPTC fields?

Well now you have a photo with two sets of conflicting keywords. But who cares right? All programs except MS ones ignore the Microsoft EXIF fields for keyword and caption. Well, if you plan to view those photos on Vista you are in trouble.

You see, Microsoft has fixed the sins of the past and Vista has proper support for all things photo. This includes new APIs and extensibility for all kinds of metadata. This includes IPTC/EXIF/XMP as well as a pluggable model for vendors to write codecs for their proprietary image formats (like Nikon has done for NEF).

Well, great you say... but here is the kicker. For compatibility reasons, Windows Photo Gallery still reads the EXIF keywords. This ensures that folks who only used Digital Image Suite will still see their keywords and captions. However, since it shows both the EXIF and IPTC keywords you don't know which one is which. Not to long ago I redid all my keywords in Adobe Bridge and iView... this fixed everything in the IPTC fields but left the EXIF fields untouched. Uh oh, now my keywords are a mess!

Well, luckily there is a way (tedious) to fix this.

  1. if you don't have it, install Digital Image Suite on Windows XP
  2. Load all your pictures and let it go through them all (this can take a while)
  3. Load the Labels view
  4. Delete every single Label

This will result in Digital Image Suite essentially zeroing out the EXIF keywords from your images (and leaving the IPTC ones in tact). Now you can move your photos to Vista and feel good knowing things will work fine from now on.

Mad props to the MS Photo team for finally getting it right on Vista (and in the .NET Framework 3.0).

Software
Posted Monday, January 29, 2007    Permalink    Comments [8]  View blog reactions

 

Sunday, January 28, 2007 11:00:41 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
The other really useful change is that the metadata APIs now update the image file without forcing a recompression of the image data unlike the GDI+ APIs for EXIF data updates etc. So if you're using a lossy file type like jpeg metadata updates don't result in further lossy compression.
Sean McLeod
Monday, January 29, 2007 6:46:49 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I have been using Digital Image Suite for years (from 9, 10 and 2006). Does Digital Image Suite work on Vista? I would hate to loose all my tags. Is there another way to convert all those tags into IPTC?
Jose
Monday, January 29, 2007 6:58:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
If that's all you've used to add keywords then you don't need to do anything and you won't lose your keywords. However, no other application besides Vista and the Windows Photo Gallery will read them.

You can't easily convert them to use IPTC unless you use iView multimedia.
Omar Shahine
Monday, January 29, 2007 7:07:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I have not had the chance to play around with Vista recently, but what if I load the photos on Windws Photo Gallery and edit the keywords which where originally entered in Digital Image Suite- would the change be written back to the Digital Image Suite exif tag or as an IPTC?
Jose
Monday, January 29, 2007 8:41:10 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
If you make any changes on vista, the metadata is written back using IPTC and XMP and the XP tags, so you could simply add a keyword to all your photos named "Remove Me" and then delete the keyword. It will cause all your files to get updated.
Omar Shahine
Monday, January 29, 2007 9:43:02 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
From a backwards compability perspective, this should never have been an issue. If Digital Image Suite was really the "only" application to use the proprietary EXIF files, it seems like ITPC should trump EXIF. That is, if EXIF is there, respect it - unless ITPC is also there.

If you're going to "make it right", then Vista should respect the "right" properties and ignore the "wrong" ones.

I'm not saying, I'm just saying.
Tim Marman
Tuesday, January 30, 2007 6:28:50 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Thanks Omar! I will do that. Here is a nice MSDN article on Vista Photo Metadata Policy detailing what you described above in your post.
I tried iView (Expression Media), but noticed that all the captions which I added in Microsoft Digital Image Suite got imported into the "IPTC Headline" field instead of the "Object Name" field which Vista uses. Some scripting might be required in iView- unless it is somehow corrected on the next release. Still, it was a good call in Vista to play nice with the other metadata schemes and to support XMP.
Jose
Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:31:14 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Another question popped up. If I simply modify the keywords for my photos in Vista Photo Gallery, does it also update/copy the other fields such as the captions, descriptions, and ratings entered in Digital Image Suite's EXIF fields so that they comply with XMP or does it leave those fields in the DIS EXIF until a change is done to each of the fields in the Photo Gallery?
Jose
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