Andrew Kantor: CyberSpeak – Metadata for images means always knowing your subject – Yahoo! News Andrew Kantor has an interesting USA Today article out today on the problem with meta data with your digital photographs and some of the solutions out today. Kantor offers some interesting solutions but frankly I’m much more interested in the solutions coming out of Vista.
I’ve just started playing with Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system, this week — but I have to say I’m super excited about how at first blush Vista seems to be handling photographs. Although in the past you could edit the metadata for your jpg images in the properties box, Microsoft in Vista is bringing tagging to the full forefront of the operating system. This tagging of meta data is really important to effectively documenting your digital photo collection. I’m hoping that the standard that Microsoft is building in Vista will be adopted by Flickr and other online photo sharing sites for easy import and export.
Another thing you are going to be really pleased with in Vista are the new views for your photos. Vista has these really great much larger than thumbnail views that just rock. You can see so much more of the photo and it’s super helpful when trying to decide which photos to edit and keep and which to throw away. And then you will now be able to rate your photos on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Very slick.
Flickr and others should adopt a 1 to 5 star rating system as well. Flickr should have three ratings: yours, everyone elses and interestingness. It all should be interchangeable on upload and download with the Vista platform of course.
I’m planning on writing a lot more about Vista in the months ahead as I get to know it better but I think when you yourself finally get a chance to try it you will be really impressed. It is one sexy OS.