Membranophonist’s Ramblings

When importing, iPhoto should use the date and time the photos were taken and your calendar to suggest event names. For days with an all day event (such as a holiday) and time-specific events, the default suggestion should be the more specific event. Overlapping events could be handled by suggesting one and presenting other event titles as options.

Bonus points awarded for allowing embedding of location data (XMP address, city, state/province, ZIP fields) if present in the calendar event’s location field. This embedding would probably be off by default for privacy reasons.

Some people (such as myself) would like to know more about the pictures used as desktop backgrounds. Photographers would probably appreciate it if the interface exposed a path to their self and/or portfolio.

Fortunately, images can carry useful information such as the photographer’s name, e-mail and web addresses, et-cetera in various metadata forms (XMP, EXIF, IPTC).

Basic Information Displayed

1. The photo title (XMP Title field).
2. The author’s name (XMP Creator field) formatted as a mailto: link with their e-mail address (XMP Creator: Email field).
3. The author’s website (XMP Creator: Website field) as a web link.

Extended Information Displayed

1. A description of the photo (XMP Description field).
2. The place the photo was taken (the XMP Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields).
3. The date the photograph was taken (EXIF digitization date).
4. The camera used to capture the photo (EXIF make and model).

Though the photo is not actually by him (as far as I know; all metadata is stripped from the default desktop pictures), Art Wolfe is a great photographer.

Continuing my EXIF jag…

One way Google could present EXIF meta-data for searching.

The ever-useful Google Image Search could become quite a bit more powerful if EXIF meta-data were available and cataloged for use as query factors.

The current advanced search features are good, but fairly general.

With good EXIF support, you could construct an image search with the following parameters:

1. Taken in the last ten days
2. Portrait oriented
3. At least 500 pixels wide
4. Photographer is Annie Leibovitz

Additional flexibility would be available once all digital cameras have GPS built-in (call me optimistic). Using location-coordinate mappings, you could specify all of the above possibilities along with where the photographs were taken. This wouldn’t be really useful for Leibovitz because she is primarily a portrait photographer, but it would be great for locating images in which the geographic location is important, such as nature scenes and current events.

Verifying that an image was taken by a particular photographer presents a problem. I suppose the source image server could be factored in as one way of measuring accuracy - if a photo came from annieleibovitz.com (just an example - there is currently nothing there), there is a good chance that the EXIF data is correct. If that site is frequently linked to by other sites, that would also lend some credence to the claim.

Currently, EXIF data is usually removed to decrease image file sizes or simply nonexistent, but that probably won’t be the case in the relatively near future as digital cameras entirely replace film for general use (around the time the term “digital” is no longer used when referring to them) and high speed connections become ubiquitous. Building new Image Search features for the future seems like a sound idea.