When will IPTC support be enabled?

tbishop61

Joined: 2003-06-23
Posts: 16
Posted: Sat, 2003-08-23 05:31

The release notes for G 1.4 don't say anything about adding the patch for supporting IPTC that Tim Strehle developed for v 1.3.3. That patch is the most useful enhancement for Gallery for my purposes -- it makes Gallery twice as useful, and I have revised my archives to use IPTC captions for all my images. However, at the moment I am blocked from upgradeing past G 1.3.3 because I don't want to lose the IPTC caption support.

Are there plans to to integrate the patch functionality into the main codebase any time soon?

Thanks,
Tim

 
joan
joan's picture

Joined: 2002-10-21
Posts: 3473
Posted: Sat, 2003-08-23 05:45
 
tbishop61

Joined: 2003-06-23
Posts: 16
Posted: Sun, 2003-08-24 04:15

Sounds great!

Thanks,
Tim

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Wed, 2003-09-03 06:55

This sounds great!

Are there any ways to be on an e-mail or RSS notify list when new versions come out?

 
alindeman
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Joined: 2002-10-06
Posts: 8194
Posted: Wed, 2003-09-03 11:40
 
beckett
beckett's picture

Joined: 2002-08-16
Posts: 3474
Posted: Wed, 2003-09-03 15:14

[RSS]

http://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_project.php?group_id=7130

Either the news release or file release is what you'll want.

-Beckett (

)

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Thu, 2003-09-04 19:54

Thank you! That's exactly what I'm looking for.

 
tbishop61

Joined: 2003-06-23
Posts: 16
Posted: Thu, 2003-10-16 22:12

How come the IPTC patch integration got delayed? I would really like it.
Thanks,
Tim

 
beckett
beckett's picture

Joined: 2002-08-16
Posts: 3474
Posted: Fri, 2003-10-17 16:07

It got pushed back to 1.4.2.

We just haven't had time to implement/test/tune it. Other tasks got a higher priority. :roll: It's a definite for v1.4.2 which puts it at about ~1 month. It's likely to be committed to CVS before that, however. :)

You can apply the patch in the mean time.

-Beckett (

)

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Sat, 2003-10-25 06:20

Hmm... so here's a question; will IPTC go both ways?

I mean, I know that -- when 1.42 is done -- I'll be able to put IPTC data in my jpegs and when they're uploaded, Gallery will note this and display this data along with the pic.

But -- here's a funky alter-look at it -- what if I upload a photo and either add or edit description data to it on Gallery; if I then download that photo, will it then have (the new) IPTC info embedded in it? If not, would this be possible?

The reason why the second scenario is important to me is because I can imagine wanting to update photo info on a semi-frequent basis; someone identifies or corrects the identification of a person shown in a picture, and I want to update the photo description to reflect this. If I make the change just online (with Gallery), then my offline jpeg will still be out-of-date. If I force myself to make the change to the offline file, I have to find it, then upload it to the correct gallery (and hope that the comment data isn't overwritten).

---

Basically, as you can hopefully now understand, I want to ensure that I can easily synchronize my online and offline photo data. With thousands of photos and quite a bit of (hopeful future) interplay with site visitors, this becomes even more critical.

What are your thoughts on this?

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Sat, 2003-10-25 06:21

Ah, and one more 'specific' followup.

With the 1.4.2 IPTC new feature, will we be able to easily control / configure mapping of IPTC data --> gallery fields?

 
beckett
beckett's picture

Joined: 2002-08-16
Posts: 3474
Posted: Sat, 2003-11-08 11:43

BTW... i'm dragging my feet on the IPTC stuff mostly because I'm not sure how everyone quite wants it to work. Can someone elaborate on what they hope to get out of it? :) (Since I don't use IPTC comments, I'm a bit out of the loop).

As for going both ways, it depends. At first, probably not, because I'm not aware of ImageMagick or NetPBM being able to edit the IPTC fields, but I might be wrong. If not those apps, is there another command line program people use to modify IPTC comments?

-Beckett (

)

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Sun, 2003-11-23 11:21

Hi there,

Since IPTC support is very important to me, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful query, and I'm eager to offer at least my two cents to help you more quickly integrate this functionality into Gallery :-)

In a nutshell, I tag my photos with IPTC data individually and sometimes by group with the following info:
- Title
- Description
- Copyright info

This way, whether I post a photo using an online service like Fotki (which extracts and shows the IPTC info) or send a batch of photos to a friend (who can then use almost any modern software to see the IPTC details), the info I've entered remains constant and readily obtainable.

One of the ways Gallery can best support this is by including an admin option to globally (or by-folder) map user IPTC data to Gallery fields. For instance, some people may use different IPTC fields for the Title, so it's best to code this flexibly.

Unfortunately, I don't know of unix software that writes back IPTC data :(. But in the meantime, I'd just be thrilled to have Gallery READ this data, so I can upload galleries of photos I've already tagged on my system without having to re-enter in all that data!

If you have any questions about this or would like any clarifications, please don't hesitate to drop me a note, and I'll respond ASAP! :)

 
tbishop61

Joined: 2003-06-23
Posts: 16
Posted: Thu, 2003-11-27 09:10

As Adam said, thanks a lot for seeking input. Like him, IPTC support is very important to me, and I was disappointed that it wasn't in 1.4.1, which otherwise looks like it has some great new features, some of which I would love to be able to use now (especially the back up to CD feature).

I use a variety of photo editing programs on Windows that support IPTC: Exifer, Breezebrowzer, and PixVue, but primarily IrfanView. When I take my pix off the camera I tag them with IPTC copyright, location info, and keywords. As I go through each one and look at it, I add caption info to the IPTC info.

What I would like Gallery to do is to read the caption info and to display it, as Tim Strehle's hack already does.

I am not so concerned about needing to modify photo files with Gallery -- I figure that I can always modify the files on my desktop, and upload them again. That feature would be a nice touch, but isn't a priority for me. I agree with Adam, it isn't worth delaying the ability to read IPTC for.

(I haven't used any command line open source programs for manipulating IPTC data, although googling IPTC source code had some promising results. I haven't worked with it myself, but I read somewhere that there were poorly documented php functions to read and write iptc data -- see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.iptcembed.php and a pear class for manipulating that data -- see [url] http://phpdorks.net/docs/api/pear/PEAR/_Image_IPTC_php.html[/url]. Hope that is helpful.)

Thanks again for seeking feedback., and thanks for Gallery. Feel free to email me if I can help you further.

 
butthead

Joined: 2003-09-29
Posts: 12
Posted: Fri, 2003-12-05 20:22

according to the imagemagick docs, it will read/write IPTC. But writing them isn't on my list either. Just the ability to read would make my day. My photo department would think that was the coolest thing since poloroid ;-)

As for how it should work, how about if no comments are specified, it scans for for the APP13 header, if nothing is embedded then it just adds the filename (if that box was checked).

It might also be useful if the image was scanned whenever the image was loaded, so that if you used gallery remote to upload, the captions still show up. It might slow loading time, but that would be marginal. In my tests with php/imagemagick, I was able to convert about 300 megs into thumbnails in under 2 seconds (athlon xp). Perhaps a caching mechanism later for slower machines?

 
ThatAdamGuy

Joined: 2003-06-16
Posts: 13
Posted: Fri, 2004-01-02 02:24

Would this php script be handy?

 
valiant

Joined: 2003-01-04
Posts: 32509
Posted: Fri, 2004-01-02 10:55

java program that can read exif and iptc.
http://www.drewnoakes.com/code/exif/index.html
as mentioned by tbishop61, a php PEAR class for reading and writing IPTC blocks from jpegs:
http://phpdorks.net/docs/api/pear/PEAR/_Image_IPTC_php.html
ImageMagick can read and write exif / iptc data:
convert -profile (details profile info)

PS: i'm not interested in IPTC im-/export, just wanted to help a little.

 
valiant

Joined: 2003-01-04
Posts: 32509
Posted: Fri, 2004-01-02 10:57

@php scripts not using any precompiled executables:
we could do quite a lot in php only, but i guess that's a speed issue.
so use jhead, imagemagick and the like and not php scripts to read/write data from binary data files.

 
Raven69
Raven69's picture

Joined: 2004-01-16
Posts: 24
Posted: Fri, 2004-01-16 09:09
tbishop61 wrote:
As Adam said, thanks a lot for seeking input. Like him, IPTC support is very important to me, ...

Found a hack for IPTC to include to gallery. Will put together all the stuff and a little description for it and put it into the forum.

So watch out :lol:

 
pawliger

Joined: 2004-01-06
Posts: 24
Posted: Sun, 2004-02-29 08:46

I would expect the IPTC caption to be an option to use as the default image caption in Gallery. I would also expect this in Gallery Remote. The choices could be: IPTC caption, image file name, none.

 
Raven69
Raven69's picture

Joined: 2004-01-16
Posts: 24
Posted: Fri, 2004-03-12 13:03

Long time no news but at last I put it all together and patched the IPTC hack against gallery.1.4.3-cvs-b112.

The original hack was done for gallery 1.3.3 and can be found at http://tim.digicol.de/gallery_iptc/

My patch can be downloaded as zip-file or tar.gz.

Hope this helps a few of you.

 
dooka
dooka's picture

Joined: 2002-10-03
Posts: 21
Posted: Sat, 2004-03-27 02:18

THANKS, RAVEN! Does this work with Gallery 1.4.2?

 
toastmaster

Joined: 2003-05-01
Posts: 219
Posted: Sun, 2005-06-05 11:27

As my many images are already up in my filespace, I would REALLY appreciate a way of adding EXIF or IPTC data (not sure which!) to embed copyright, website and name info in my images, all at once in a batch. I don't even mind just running a standalone app to do this - it's only going to need to be done once! Any ideas?
Had a quick Google, but haven't found anything php or "runnable on my webserver" based.

 
rtholmes

Joined: 2007-04-17
Posts: 5
Posted: Wed, 2008-11-12 20:23

The code in the patch still works in 1.5.9; I just manually inserted it in the code though, I doubt it would put it in the right spot otherwise. Thanks for the code Raven69!