[Bins] Feature proposals: IPTC

[Martin Pohlack]

Hi,

I have some further suggestions for bins:

I would really love support for IPTC flags, as for example, mapivi
(http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml) can insert them into jpeg
files.

 - Most interesting seems the "urgency" flag, which is used to rate
   images (express their quality etc.).

   It would be great if I could call bins and tell it to generate an
   album with all images having a higher urgency than, say, 5.  This way
   you can store related images together and once they are rated, create
   albums with just the highlights.

   Currently, I would copy (or link) the best ones to a new directory
   and call bins on this dir, however the image selecting effort is lost
   for later reuse this way.  This effort however is very time consuming
   in my experience.

 - IPTC also allows for keywords, titles, and so on.  These fields look
   very  similar to the information which can be added to the
   bins-generated xml files, but they are stored where they belong ---
   in the image itself.

   Bins should populate its xml-files from these IPTC fields, if they
   are available.  This way the information can also be put into the
   details pages of the various styles.

 - Maybe later on bins could also search images based on keywords:
   Generate an album from all images with a minimum rating of 5 and
   which contain the keywords Architecture or both keywords, London and
   Skyline:

   bins ... --min_urgency=5 --keywords="'Architecture' | ('London' &
      'Skyline') source_dir dest_dir

   Ahh, well, just dreaming ...


I really think that meta information on images should be stored inside
them, such that it is not lost on transfer.


There is a perl library available to access IPTC information in jpeg
files and mapivi (also written in perl) uses it to obtain and store the
information.  Maybe the relevant bits and pieces can be 'borrowed' from it?


There is an alternative to including all these search and filter
features into bins.  One could use an external search tool to find all
the relevant images and give bins a list of files to generate the album
from.  I think this is more the unix way (using small combinable tools)
 :-) .  Using this method bins would only have to support getting a list
of files as arguments.

Unfortunately I don't know of any such (command line) tool, do you?

Regards,
Martin