Greater Niagara Photographic Association Site

New Metadata tool for Windows
The group I belong to at Microsoft has released another software add-in for Windows XP and Windows Vista that enables you to view and edit metadata for your images (most "standard" image types in addition to some Canon and Nikon RAW images). This tool is available as a free (though unsupported) download from the Microsoft Pro Photo website (www.microsoft.com/prophoto/).

What advantages would this add-in have for the average photographer over some of the other free programs that allow you to see EXIF data?

It allows bulk changes like to add a copywrite...of to fix the date or time on a bunch of images...

A "tidbit" I picked up on the web today regarding using the Metadata Tool on TIFF files.

A question raised on one of the forums:

Someone raised the question of whether Microsoft's new Photo Info
> Add-in decompresses TIFF images when it is used to change/add IPTC
> info. I have just made a copy of a TIFF image which was 15.9MB and
> edited some IPTC fields with 'Photo Info'. The edited file is now
> 34.6MB.

Answer below:

Here's a quote from the Photo Info readme file:

"The size of TIFF files may increase substantially when adding or changing metadata if the file was saved using TIFF compression. This is because the file is rewritten as an uncompressed (standard) TIFF file. (This is currently a limitation of the Windows Imaging Component TIFF metadata writer.)"

I am not sure if I'm the only Mac user here, well I'm computer bilingual, but here is a tip for all those Apple Heads.  Just click on the photo’s icon, then press Command-i to bring up the info dialog. When it appears, click on the right-facing triangle beside the words “More info” and the basic eXiF data will appear.