Josh did a great job explaining how they handle Photo Metadata in Microsofts new operating system – Windows Vista. He stated by explaining why metadata should be stored inside the media file “The Truth Is In The File”. – “This enables metadata portability – wherever the file goes, the metadata goes”. But today metadata is everywhere, which makes it difficult to use across applications. Before every application developer had to write his own metadata handler or rely on third party libraries. Microsoft has created what they call WIC (Windows Imaging Components). WIC is an extensible, system-wide platform for image handling.
Applications can utilize WIC to:
• Read & write image formats
• Perform RAW conversion
• Read & write metadata
• Transcode between image formats
This means that it gets easy for developers to incorporate support for several metadata standards in their application. To address the problem with overlapping standards they have created a policy system. WIC rely on external Codecs for image file handling. For camera RAW files it utilizes Codecs from camera vendors. It has EXIF, IPTC and XMP suuport out of the box. WIC ships with Vista; but are also available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server “Longhorn”
Microsoft recently bought iView which is a popular application for image keywording and mark-up. The have now incorporated it in their product portfolio under the name Microsoft Expression Media.
Notes from the first Photo Metadata Conference. This conference was held in Florence, Italy june 7, 2007. It was organized by Cepic, IPTC and IFRA. These are my private notes published to give you some idea of what was discussed. I will later write some articles from the conference and publish those on BLF.se and DigitalFotografen.se, but probably only in Swedish. If there are any demand I might make a short translated version in English. You can find presentations and more information at phmdc.org and cepic.org .