Hello, the current MATA DATA panel is showing just a limited content. In some Meta data im not interested in, others I’m missing. A great enhencement would be, if PL users could customize the Meta Data panel. Means to customize what datas are visible and what should be hidden.
Given that there are just under 28,000 different tags available, that is highly unlikely.
What tags are you missing?
Hi,
[Dont’ forget to vote for your own request]
I had a look at this and unfortunately, the references to the metadata displayed in the panel are hard coded and spread over an impressive number of program DLLs. So IMHO, don’t hold your breath : implementing your request implies rewriting or redesigning a lot of code.
Once again, we are back to a discussion about the DPL UI design. In Lightroom, you can define your own metadata selection in easily editable presets. This feature is available since version 1.0.
I admit, given the incredible mess in the various specifications targeting photographic metadata, developers have a hard time keeping such code up-to-date. This is why it was important, from the very beginning, to implement a design that would be flexible enough to quickly adapt to the unending changes in the metadata specs. I’m afraid it’s now too late for DPL with it’s current UI design.
Hi, e.g. I’m missing “focus mode”, “AFAreaMode”. My images are RAW’s from Sony (A77II) and there are much more Meta Data that are important for me. Currently I’m using an external app to get this meta out of the pic. However it would be much better to have this in just one application.
Hi, thank you for your fast response. This sounds really dissapointing to me. I’m not using any Adobe app. As a database I’m using IMatch and DxO PL for processing. In Imatch it is possible to customize Meta Data visibility. My hope was if it would be possible in DxO, too. Being honest, this is something I’m expecting from a professional tool. As a workaround I’ll add a favorit to my external Meta Data viewer.
From a cursory glance over the ExifTool docs, these appear to be Sony tags and they can be interpreted differently according to the model. This makes them far too specific for a general tool.
As @Pat91 says, the whole metadata world is a total nightmare. When we were testing PL5, we had a heck of an argument to get what we finally ended up with - mainly due to DxO interpreting the standards differently from certain other software and outputting incompatible metadata.
Frankly, I don’t blame them for steering clear of metadata and leaving it to those who specialise in it.
Understood, thank you very much for your comments, regards HGF
Hi, last night I was thinking about this topic. For me DxO is a powerful tool with which I edit RAW files almost professionally. And especially in this area it is absolutely necessary to know the META data of an image and to be able to compare it between several images. The current implementation in DxO PL is simply not sufficient for this. It does not seem to be particularly difficult to read out and visualise the data. I currently use https://exiftool.org/ as an external tool and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. It supports a wide range of cameras and I can create a user view that only shows me the values I’m interested in. And it’s freeware. I’m struggling to understand why it would be complicated to implement such a function in a professional app.
Like @Pat91 mentioned, Adobe had that in their Lightroom app from version 1.0, I like to add “Apple Aperture also had that”. I can configure my own set of metadata being on display, including Nikon specialities and the selected focus point, too.
Once again, it’s interesting to read another user’s desire to use ONE “professional app” to see what’s in the file, instead of crawling back and forth between various specialized apps. I try to think if I ever used a professional app in which I constantly need “another tool to work around missing features”?
Ok, I replaced the stupid Windows Explorer against a better file manager and Adobe Bridge.
Next thing was skipping the highly flawed and limited graphical drawing part in Adobe FrameMaker and use Illustrator for better and easier drawings which were easy to import in FM and less easy to work directly with.
And now I replaced all Adobe products by the better integrated, easier to use Affinity suite.
Yes, there’s a clear tendency in my work life to look for less and easier to use tools instead of cluttering my “programs” folder with more specialists.
Sorry @HGF that you have to use three tools to inspect, organize and edit your images.
DxO’s way is like imitating old darkroom routines with folders for negatives, spreadsheets and contact sheet for what’s in what’s in, spread sheets how to enlarge and dodge and burn instead of using a computer to make life easier.
More about this topic…
As already mentioned, there are thousands of various EXIF, IPTC, XMP and MAKER metadata tags. They are not clearly documented and the specs are not even stable. Many of them are not of any use for us photographers. There are actually different problems related to this situation :
- Identifying the tags that are actually useful
- Accessing them
- Managing the duplicates
The only usable reference for photographic metadata is the work of Phil Harvey. Not just Exiftool but all the documentation he produced and is constantly updating. He should be rewarded for this. Many apps and specialized tools are actually using Exiftool in the background. The editors of image processing software should be able to agree about a subset of these numerous tags that should be supported in their apps. That would be a first step.
However, there are other problems that makes things difficult : the proprietary tags (usually found in the MAKER and XMP areas). There are tags that have no meaning outside of a given app. Others make only sense for a given camera model or brand. To make things even more difficult some camera makers are encrypting some of their proprietary metadata so that only their own software can read them. Canon is a good example : sometimes the very same information is encrypted for a camera and not for another model.
To add insult to injury, the lack of coordination between the various committees working on metadata results in the duplication of the same information in different areas. The Creator, Author and Artist tags are a good example. Moreover, these duplicated metadata might be hard to locate because they are not always identified by name. EXIF and IPTC tag IDs are numbers and the name is not explicitly specified. The label chosen to display the information to the user in a given app is up to the developer. On the other hand, XMP metadata are identified by domain name and tag name.
Now imagine an app that needs to write a possibly duplicated information to a file. It doesn’t know in advance which app will read the value of a given tag. So, it should normally write that information to each metadata area that is supposed to contain it, using the correct tag ID for EXIF or IPTC and the correct domain and tag names for XMP.
So, I agree with Joanna, it’s a nightmare and I understand that developers be reluctant to dive into this swamp. However, when it comes to read metadata from any image file produced by any camera, most of the job is already done by Exiftool. For DPL, it’s just a matter of interfacing with either the Exiftool command line program or with the Exiftool Perl library (like so many apps and tools already do) and to adapt the DPL UI. It’s not that big a deal.
The problem of metadata management could also be solved by specialized plugins if DPL had a programming interface. I understand that the DxO may not have enough resources to implement all the features requested by their users but if they could provide a plugin SDK, third-party developers could do the job for them. Why this SDK doesn’t already exist is not exactly a mystery : if not anticipated, it’s hard to implement “after the fact”.
1 Like
@Pat91 , Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us in such detail. I agree with you 100%. There is nothing to add. HGF