I was finally going to get into the game. After using all the great new tools available, I was going to contribute one of my own. I was going to write a utility that analyzed XMP info in a photo and added them as Flickr tags. But Flickr already does it! Damn Flickr and its yummy goodness!

XMP is cool, I only wish I had learned about it a few months ago. XMP is an Adobe extension to JPEG header information that attaches meta data about a photo to the photo itself. It’s like EXIF, but instead of the boring technical crap you can add keywords, photographer, location, etc. Mostly I use it for keywording. There is an excellent app, pixvue, that works entirely as a shell extension, that let’s you edit the XMP data.

Most importantly, the data is attached to the photos, not stored in whatever proprietary keyword format you have been using. Unfortunately a lot of our photos are already keyworded in Paint Shop Photo Album. The biggest drawback there is that the keyword database stays on the machine you created it on. So if I’m browsing the photos from the laptop and I want to see all photos marked “jane”, I’m SOL. But not anymore! Thanks Pixvue. :)