Embedded XMP Support & Ratings

[neutrino]

XNView is a great viewer. However, I'm currently preferring Adobe Bridge because it supports great metadata handling capability, including rating, and filtering.

It works by embedding the metadata information (such as labels and ratings) directly into the JPG files using the XMP standard (free SDK available by Adobe, see http://partners.adobe.com/public/develo ... topic.html).

This has the great advantage that the data is never lost if the images are copied or moved around.

And it is very easy to apply a rating to image currently viewed: just hit number keys 1 to 5 to assign 1 to 5 stars.

However, Bridge has far inferior possibilities (compared to XNView) to view the images (the only thing that works in that direction is the slideshow, which uses only poor-quality images from Bridge's cache).

If XNview would manage to handle the metadata the same way as Adobe Bridge, it would be really the killer solution for my image archive.

Could you have a look on the Bridge functionality (it is a companion to Adobe Photoshop CS2, which you might use anyway; if not a free 30 day trial version is available from https://www.adobe.com/de/downloads/)

And consider XMP and rating integration into XNView?

If you then look at the currently available free Adobe Photoshop Lightroom beta 4.2, which has a marvellous implementation of filtering, and implement something similar for XNView - it would be even better. (Note that I have abandoned Lightroom, because the only way to write the metadata to the files there is by exporting them, which causes a quality loss; otherwise they are lost in the proprietary lightroom database)

I noticed that you are planning for rating support in the current beta anyway. However, I fear that you will use a proprietary storage for the rating information (some hidden files), which will be not transparent for other applications.

I do have already created some perl scripts based on the ExifTool (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) that works on the XMP data to delete or move away low quality images and I like the openness the XMP standard brings and allows for such approaches.

[Olivier_G]

You may find this suggestion interesting: it supports your idea to store most data/organization (including ratings) in XMP.