Hi,

This is an announcement that I've placed in the Gimp PlugIn Registry a plug-in for viewing and interacting with image parasites. It can be found in the 2.0 category, under the name "meta-data". I have only tested it in Linux. There is no obvious reason why it should fail to work in other OS's, but no guarantees either.

Here is a brief excerpt from the README file:

=== What is it? ===
This is the first release of a plug-in that lets you interact with Gimp image attachments (often known as "parasites"). You can list them, view the contents of any that contain text, create new ones, delete or edit the contents of existing ones, load one from a file, or write one to a file.
=== What is it good for? ===

Currently the Gimp is not very strong in its handling of meta-data: the main purpose of this plug-in is to encourage it to get stronger by making the meta-data visible and accessible to the user.
Even so, there are a couple of things you can already do with it.
1) The attachment named "gimp-comment" is saved by several file formats as an image description. You can alter this by editing it.

2) You can attach notes or comments to the image that will be preserved if you save the image in XCF format.
3) It might be possible to attach a color profile to an image and have it included when you save a TIFF file -- I haven't been able to test this, though, so don't get excited yet.
You cannot use this plug-in to work with EXIF data, unfortunately: it is stored in a binary format that requires special handling.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I will be traveling for most of the next two weeks, though, and will not be able to respond until I get back.

Best,
-- Bill

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Dave Neary wrote:

You cannot use this plug-in to work with EXIF data, unfortunately: it is stored in a binary format that requires special handling.

Any plans to add this in the future?

There have been (long) discussions on this before...

[ . . . ]

Somewhere in there you might find some ideas for how exif data could be handled :)

Actually it's not so hard. The libexif site contains code for a widget called "gtk_exif_browser", which operates on an exif_data structure of the sort that you (Dave) wrote the code to load from a jpeg file for people who have libexif. So it's simply a matter of writing a plug-in that starts a gtk_exif_browser and feeds the contents of the jpeg-exif-data parasite to it -- really not more than a few hours of work, probably. The only downside is that the gtk_exif_browser code is unmaintained and rather buggy, but it does at least basically work. (The libexif site also has the code for a program called gexif which is simply a wrapper around gtk_exif_browser. All of this stuff compiles straightforwardly except that you have to turn off -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED in the Makefile.)

Personally I think it would be easier to have an EXIF editor, a Dublin Core editor, an IPTC/XMP editor and so on, rather than have one generic one size fits all metadata editor which magically makes itself look OK regardless of the data involved.

I agree completely, at least for the initial stages of development. At some point in the future, it might be desirable to try to wrap things up neatly -- but not now.

Best, -- Bill

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Michael Schumacher wrote:

3) It might be possible to attach a color profile to an image and have it included when you save a TIFF file -- I haven't been able to test this, though, so don't get excited yet.

Maybe someone could give some tips on how this is done? Might make some of the "I need CMYK, though I don't know what it really is" users very happy :)

Here is a method that ought to work, but please note that this suggestion is completely untested because my system does not have any color management support. If you load a TIFF file that contains a color profile, you should see it in the parasite list in the plug-in. If you save that parasite to a file, you ought to be able to load that file as a new parasite for a different image -- using the same parasite name as the one you saved, of course -- and then it ought to be attached when you save the image in TIFF format.

Now of course this is a ridiculous kludge, and I'm sure that as soon as I have time to figure out how color profiles are stored on a system, I'll be able to make it work more correctly.

Best, -- Bill

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