XnView Software

I made some research (see my www) and found there is lack of compatibility in Five-Star-Rating between graphics software. Other IPTC and EXIF data are compatible enough but the Star Rating not.
For example the Windows Vista Photo Gallery doesn't show those "stars" (View/Rating&Colour labels) I set in XnView. I'm afraid the Photo Gallery store those data (rating) in some proprietary fields so it's not the XnView problem. Anyway, I suggest XnView should write the rating into the current (proper) place and also into the Windows Photo Gallery place.
We can not fight Microsoft, unfortunately.

Are Labels and Ratings currently written into picture file?
Does the ratng use Adobe’s XMP standard?
Are the labels mapped to the IPTC standard’s Urgency annotation fields (iView style)?
Is there any way how to search by Star Rating or Labels?

If not, isn't it good improvement?

I know what you mean and I think that there is no special attribute specified for a rating.

But I think a solution could be the use of the keywords field.

A rating is basically nothing more than a characteristic of the image like other keywords. I I`ve for my purpose defined the keywords "1star", "2star",..., "5star" and I write it into the keywords-field.

So I am sure that the rating is saved inside the image and I can question it with every program capable of IPTC-metadata.

Greetings Venturis

The new Nikon Viewer (ViewNX) has a 5 star rating that is compatible to Windows Vista.
I think it would be a good idea to add such a rating in XnView also.
At the moment, no other Viewer (except the Vista Explorer) is able to show this rating.

Walter

Hey Pierre
What do you think about this suggestion???

Thank you

cnnrbl wrote:Hey Pierre
What do you think about this suggestion???

Sorry to not reply, yes it's a good suggestion, i'll try to add synchronisation between rating from xnview and rating in other software with IPTC

As far as I know, the rating used by Vista is stored in a specific XMP-tag called ^^
There's a bracket at the beginning and at the end, but I can't paste it due to HTML-code restrictions


Don't know where Xnview stores its rating.
A common rating system would be highly appreciated by me as well

Could you send me a file rated by PhotoGallery?

But please, whatever you do, please always keep
an option NOT to write anything into the files itself and to
instead store all rating / etc. info in XnView's own database,
as it is possible now.

xnview wrote:Could you send me a file rated by PhotoGallery?

Sure ... sorry for my late reply. It will arrive within a few minutes

Hello, any news to this topic?

Currently, I am using iView as my database, and it writes its 5-star-rating as XMP, so according to Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom? So Adobe and Microsoft seem some quite mighty guys on the market.

Unfortunately, this field is not part of the "IPTC Core"-part of XMP, but it seems to be used by an increasing amount of software, see down. It would great to stay compatible!

To get a look over the fence
http://forums.acdsystems.com/index.php?showtopic=5975
http://thedambook.com/smf/index.php?topic=2830.msg15944

Dirk13 wrote:Hello, any news to this topic?

Currently, I am using iView as my database, and it writes its 5-star-rating as XMP, so according to Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom? So Adobe and Microsoft seem some quite mighty guys on the market.

Unfortunately, this field is not part of the "IPTC Core"-part of XMP, but it seems to be used by an increasing amount of software, see down. It would great to stay compatible!

To get a look over the fence
http://forums.acdsystems.com/index.php?showtopic=5975
http://thedambook.com/smf/index.php?topic=2830.msg15944

So an option to write in XMP the rating when you change it will be good, right?

xnview wrote: So an option to write in XMP the rating when you change it will be good, right?

Yes, an option to write ratings&colors in XMP, or into IPTC keywords field, or only into category.db (xnview default), or XMP+category.db or IPTC keywords feld+category.db (5 possibilities), is a good idea ?

Or an easier way with just 3 possibilities : option to write rating in XMP or only into category.db (xnview default), or both ?

But with Keywords ratings like: 1-star-rating ... 5-star-rating(iView), or 1star, 2star ... 5star or 1/5 2/5 ... 5/5 or 1, 2 ... 5(Vista) or ......???
like this : or like this ... : or .....
and same problem for the color labels : the keyword in english (red, green...), or else .... ?

....It's not always easy to standardize !
Then maybe the best way is to use for the moment, the great exiftool soft, case by case ?

Hello Pierre,
yes, in my opinion it would be fine to be able to write the rating XMP-compatibly into the file -- and vice versa to read and show the rating stars found as XMP in the file.

(Besides, it would be great to have the option to show the IPTC caption in the status footline of XnView, instead of the JPEG comment. Shall I suggest this in a different thread?)

oops66, I got a little confused from your post. What would be the advantage of writing a rating into the all-purpose keywords? OK, almost any program can read it, but I think it would be somewhat hidden.
I am working a little bit with databases, and I definitely prefer dedicated fields containing a restricted set of key values instead of writing and reading text, which is quite error-prone.

The color labels are typically mapped to the ITPC urgency field, e.g. from iView Multimedia or Photoshop CS - see the tables at the end of these documents:
http://www.iptc.org/std/Iptc4xmpCore/1. ... ide_13.pdf
page 147 http://downloads.iview-multimedia.com/m ... al_Eng.pdf
So there is no need to write color names as text into file.


So, I agree, with a good screwdriver (e.g. Exiftool) you can do a lot by yourself, but it seems we already have a quite standardized way for both colors and ratings that we might applicate.

Windows Vista has a new format to show the rating for all files as 5 stars.
Nikon ViewNX is supporting the new Vista feature.

It would be great, if XnView could read and write the rating in the same way as Vista is doing it.