Add IPTC Support

[derek]

Add support for reading IPTC data from images.

http://www.plogger.org/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=478

[StFS]

There's some discussion about IPTC headers in ticket #53 (Picture tagging).

The idea there is to use the IPTC headers to store the tags that are set on a picture. This will of course not work well for searching for images by tags since performance of opening up all the images and reading the tags would be horrible but instead the tag information would be stored in database for fast searching but also stored in the IPTC headers of the image itself. this would mean that the tag information would not get lost even if the images would be moved to somewhere else.

[Geodog]

I would love this functionality, but I would encourage you to be cautious. I chatted about this with Adam Tow at Mashup Camp http://www.tow.com/2006/02/21/mashup-camp-day-2/. He knows a lot more about digital photography than I do, and he was of the opinion that while there are lots of libraries capable of reading IPTC, he hasn't found one that he would trust to modify people's images.

[derek]

Alright. I'm not too worried about the IPTC write capability; it seems like folks will mainly be uploading IPTC-capable images and want Plogger to extract the information.

I thought this might be like the EXIF functionality in Plogger, but somebody in the forum said they don't want it "hidden like EXIF data". So, should some fields be used for the title/description, and the rest ignored? Or should it be like EXIF? Putting the IPTC data in the existing fields means searches and picture tagging would still work as expected, with or without IPTC. Also, I think it best to only read IPTC when files are first uploaded.

Some additional implementation info would be appreciated.

[Geodog]

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking. When I am editing the photos I put in the IPTC caption field the information that I would like to have appear titling the photograph, for example" Under the Fishing Pier" on your demo gallery at http://www.plogger.org/demo/places/north_america/Spring%20Break%2004%20007.jpg or see for instance my photos at http://www.thebishop.net/gallery/2006mashupcamp

Then I input the IPTC keywords for tags, like http://www.flickr.com/photos/geodog/110774940/

I assume that plogger will support tags at some point?

Please feel free to email me http://www.thebishop.net/contact/form.php if you would like me to flesh this out further.

Thanks again for taking this on.

[StFS]

I've been looking at this a bit while researching the possibility of using IPTC for storing the tags of an image as I described in #53.

I've found the following PHP library that looks pretty promising: http://www.ozhiker.com/electronics/pjmt/index.html

My first impressions:

• Impressive feature list.
• The guy seems to know his way around the standards involved.
• Toolkit being used in "live" products.
• Looks like excellent documentation and examples are provided.
• Not quite sure about code quality but it is well documented.
• Support for EXIF and IPTC and some more acronyms that I haven't heard of.

But just to be absolutely clear on it: I have never used this thing so I cannot vouch for it!

Kind regards, Stefan.

[anonymous]

IPTC support is the first thing I look for in a Gallery.

The best one so far is ExhibitEngine?. That gallery also allows you to pick what fields to show and what to hide. I have set up a page on www.oceanwatcher.com that hides most things, but of course shows the caption field. Also, it uses the IPTC title field as the picture title. So I only have to do this once.

It makes sense to read this when the picture is uploaded. The title and description should be read from IPTC along with keywords so instead of showing empty fields ready to be filled in, you get prefilled fields ready to be edited if necessary :-)

Isn't ajax the perfect thing to use with this? I would love to have things displayed the way I have it on www.oceanwatcher.com . It is clean and anyone that need more info can get it by clicking the link...

I would actually love to lift the priority on this because it is really important to anyone that has an archive of thousands of pictures and want to make an online gallery of them. But I have a feeling that should be left to the developers to decide :-) Nobody in their right mind would even consider sitting down and writing titles and descriptions on thousands of pictures when it has already been done.

[Oceanwatcher]

Ooops, sorry. Did not realise the last comment went on as Anonymous.

[sidtheduck]

I helped a forum user with EXIF information and extracting it to the database for searchability. I believe EXIFixer also allows *some* IPTC support. Once the admin options have been reorganized in the database schema, we could probably add a list of EXIF / IPTC information that could be extracted and saved to the database and let the users select which fields to utilize.