Photos online

June 19, 2005

I uploaded a bunch of photos, namely of Lajas wedding, the round the world trip last year with teresa, and teresas birthday brunch in february.

The workflow is pretty annoying, the more I do this the more I see what is wrong in todays photo editing/publishing workflows. I'm gonna write about this in more detail sometime soon, but just to mention some things i deem pretty essential to the sanity of computer users as data quantities keep rising:

  • Metadata that is stored in a generic way (not exif here, xmp there, iptc somewhere else and ipv3 in yet another place)
  • Metadata that is stored independant of the data (there is a reason this is called metadata, you know)
  • Metadata that is indexed centrally by the filesystem
  • Support for walking down whichever transformation road you want (IPTC<->EXIF<->XMP<->something usefull)
  • OS independant libraries to read/process this, with high-level wrappers for a broad range of scripting languages

and so on, but these are the essentials that I see atm. Feel free to comment on this, or suggest possible solutions.