From Gunar

I can only see metadata, XMP specifically, becoming more important if 
this new "Cloud Rule" begins to take hold with customers.

Google's Data Liberation Front springs from customer 
altruism but it also builds pressure in the industry to provide data 
portability with cloud based services.  For the customer, it removes 
the 'icky' from the stickyness of web based services, for the service 
providers it removes an excuse for not keeping their services 
competitive.

Yet to be seen if this will put pressure on services like Facebook and 
Picassa to allow them to export them images with socially added tags 
embedded in the images.

Last I checked none of the description, keywords or ratings I added 
online at Photoshop.com were preserved in the photo I downloaded.

The Metadata Working Group (MWG) has recent posted Test Files for verifying The Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata. These files are critical for developers that are handling image metadata in their applications or services. Especially if they trying to reconcile IIM-IPTC, Exif, and XMP metadata.

The specification and the test files are the result of the great collaboration between the companies the make up the MWG: Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia, and Sony.

The topic may be pretty esoteric or dry for most but metadata interoperability will be increasing important in improving our digital experience. The rate of sharing digital images is exploding. The ability to tag and sharing information related to those images as they move from phone/camera to OS, to application, to online service and then back to a phone is critical in providing the foundation for the sharing and personalization experiences.

It also provides the foundation for sharing and preserving important information such as copyright and rights usage. Embedded metadata such as XMP is becoming the communication channel that is carried with the media - it can carry the connections to build businesses - think about embedding your business card info in your media, or even e-commerce related information about how to license the image or purchase what is in the picture.

The File Info dialog is used to manage metadata across most Adobe applications.

One feature of the dialog is the MRU (most recently used) auto complete feature that keeps track of the last 20 values that you have entered in the property. This is useful if you have a small set of common values that you use over and over.

But what if you want to store more values? Or clear them? Or even fix the values that are selectable?

Here is how you accomplish this - first find the file "FileInfoMRU.xml" on your machine.

Mac:
/Users/<user>/Library/Preferences/Adobe/XMP/File Info/2.0/work/FileInfoMRU.xml

PC:
C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\XMP\File Info\2.0\work\FileInfoMRU.xml


Open it up in a text editor. And you should see something similar to the following:

<xfi:fileinfo xmlns:xfi="http://ns.adobe.com/xmp/fileinfo/">
<xfi:mruLists>
<xfi:mruList key="dc:creator" maxEntries="20">
<item>John Smith</item>
<item>John Adams</item>
</xfi:mruList>
<xfi:mruList key="dc:title" maxEntries="20">
<item>one</item>
<item>two</item>
<item>three</item>
<item>four</item>
</xfi:mruList>
</xfi:mruLists>
</xfi:fileinfo>

Each key defines the namespace and property - for example "dc:creator" - "dc" designates the Dublin Core namespace, "creator" is the property name. This property is shown by the Description panel as "Author", it is also used by the IPTC panel as "Creator".

We can see that dc:creator has 2 MRU items:

<xfi:mruList key="dc:creator" maxEntries="20">
<item>John Smith</item>
<item>John Adams</item>
</xfi:mruList>

and dc:title has 4 MRU items:

<xfi:mruList key="dc:title" maxEntries="20">
<item>one</item>
<item>two</item>
<item>three</item>
<item>four</item>
</xfi:mruList>

The maxEntries property defines the maximum number of MRU entries that are stored per specific property. That can be changed to support more or less items - a setting of zero disables the MRU.

There is an undocumented feature to ensure that the list remains static by adding 'closedList="true"'. This locks down the list so that no new values are added or removed. Below is an example we can create:

<xfi:mruList key="dc:title" maxEntries="100" closedList="true">
<item>paper</item>
<item>scissors</item>
<item>rock</item>
</xfi:mruList>

In the above example we've limited the choices to 3. Effectively this is a simple example of a controlled vocabulary. Of course, this type of CV functionality can also be accomplished with a Flex custom panel.



Technorati Tags: xmp, cs4, mru, metadata, file info, fileinfo

Well, not exactly. But if you are a metahead thinking about speech to text in XMP and the potential for that metadata to connect to other information, this video provides a lighter side view of what could be. [via]

We have recently posted the Dynamic Media Partner Guide [PDF] for XMP on the Adobe labs page for XMP ActionScript.

If you are interested in understanding how metadata is being captured and stored in videos, this is the document to read.

This document discusses additions to the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), that provide a model for dealing with digital dynamic media, such as movies that contain many audio and video elements. The document model for dynamic media requires asset management, to allow tracking the history and composition of complex resources. Further, dynamic media objects contain time-related elements, and the metadata for these must be able to model temporal values such as start-time and duration.

This document provides guidance to developers writing applications that read, write, and modify dynamic media documents, so that those applications can maintain the integrity of the composition and editing history and temporal metadata in composed documents, and assign document identifiers correctly and unambiguously.

Let us know what you think!  Feedback is appreciated.

Technorati Tags: xmp, metadata, video, FLV, Flash, MPEG, AVI, MOV