[Bins] Feature proposals: IPTC

[Jérôme SAUTRET]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 10:26:43PM +0100, Martin Pohlack wrote:
> 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.

This could be done with an external script that creates an album.list
file with pictures names corresponding to the urgency level you want.

>  - 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.

Actually, it seems IPTC IIM (the one used by MaPiVi) has some
limitations : no Unicode, no customized fields. But the new IPTC Core
1.0 format includes XMP (based on RDF) which allow about all we're
doing with BINS XML description files. I see IPTC XMP as a real option
to replace XML files. As said Martin, I think it is better to store
data in the picture itself (for transfer, for example). Anyone knows a
Open Source software running on GNU/Linux and able to manage this
format ? I'd like to see what can be done exactly.

>  - 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
> 
> 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?

If you're talking of Image::IPTCInfo, it's nor clear if it can handle
XMP. Maybe Image::ExifTool can use 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?

It should be easy to do it in shell as long as there is a command line
tool that just report IPTC field values. Anyone aware of one ? This
should be in fact the same mechanism that for the urgency filter.

-- 
Jérôme SAUTRET (Jerome at SAUTRET.org)           http://SAUTRET.org
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