Before I submit a new request on this, I'd like to have a quick discussion. I saw the topic of XMP listed in some old enhancement requests and forum postings, but no specific mention of whether or not it was implemented.

Windows Vista uses XMP as the native tagging engine for photos (via Windows Photo Gallery). The last batch of photos I uploaded were auto-tagged with "Christmas" by Vista on import, and I don't see that tag showing up in ZP so I assume it's not reading XMP tags.

Is there anything I've missed, or should I submit the request? Given Vista's native use of XMP, I think it should be in ZP as well.

Currently we use the IPTC standard (keywords), not XMP for tags. No reason a request couldn't be made for XMP though.

"Given Vista's native use of XMP, I think it should be in ZP as well."

Well, as a Mac user I certainly can't agree to that argumentation...:-)

pnear, can you post one of the pictures in question?

This is the first I've heard of XMP, but it looks like its Adobe's attempt to update IPTC, but IPTC is included in it as well. Possibly we could use php's built in iptc parser to get at XMP as well...

XMP was an Adobe standard, I pushed MS to support a standard for photo tagging during the beta cycles for Vista and they opted for XMP over IPTC since it can tag any filetype and not just JPG.

I'll call that a victory - at least they did more than the original plan to just store it as a windows file attribute which would have be useable by nobody. ;-)

I'll add a FR and attach a photo to it as well.

Feature request and sample photo located here.

http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/ticket/351

I believe that XMP files are "sidecar" files that accompany the image. (At least that is how Adobe Bridge does it.) So, they are a little bit of a bastardization. Easy to get separated or mixed up. Bridge will add these tags to any jpeg images it saves, placing them in the standard IPTC fields.

I am sorry to hear that Vista has adopted this bit of a kludge, but then that is just another reason not to upgrade from XP.

Certainly we could immplement XMP so long as someone has PHP support for retrieving the fields. Submit a feature request. When we get the voting working we will see if it warrents devoging developer time.

It's definitely a single-file embedded solution, no sidecar files in Vista. I did some searching and there are PHP libraries that support it, pretty sure Menalto gallery supports it now too.

More info about XMP tags in Vista can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx

There is a toolkit here that does XMP, but it looks like it's not being maintained any more. http://www.ozhiker.com/electronics/pjmt/

There's also some sample code here that looks useful: http://photography-on-the.net/ee/beta/cs_xmp_to_exif.php

Bottom-line, from looking at both of these code samples, is that you just open the file and read in the XML data using standard PHP commands. Then you can either manually parse the data, or use PHP's XML library. If I open the JPG file in notepad, I can see the XML data there in plain text.

I've finally added a sample file to the bug this morning as well.

I would also like to see this. The tagging support in Window Live Photo Gallery is much better than that of Picasa and is easier than tagging via the web. I had been using digikam, but it doesn't run on Windows which I am using for now (gaming works much better in Windows).

I work with XMP a lot as a photographer. XMP is what Adobe RAW tags are saved to. XMP is also customizable. ArtStor (the largest online gallery of art) uses XMP ArtStorCore. I use those tags in Adobe Bridge for my image database. I think the ability to pull XMP from files is crucial to staying on top of things. IPTC, although we love it, will not be used as much in the coming years by both PCs and Macs as Adobe starts going towards a more adaptible extensible markup (XMP). So XMP is not just Windows. It's a standard XML markup that envelopes all sorts of tagging schemes including IPTC.

You can view the work that's going on with XMP here. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/ I would suggest adding a Flex GUI for metadata handling. Adobe has already done a lot of the leg-work for XMP 2 via Flex. It wouldn't be to much to put this online and Adobe would probably hire anyone who does it.

Isn't easy enough to save the keywords (tags) and other code in the JPG file that gets uploaded to the server and make ZenPhoto read it like it is right now. I am not seeing XMP reading something you need, as uploading RAW files is something we wouldn't do?

I do love the XMP standard and how clean and handy it is. Well tough many people don't like it the reason given is all the small extra little files all over the place. I do like it however. I am looking forward to see how the DNG goes in the future where the XMP is "build" into the RAW file.

This is a common miss-understanding with XMP. XMP can be both embedded and built as sidecars. My first impression of XMP was one of distaste because the format was not portable (ie: embedded into files like IPTC.) I was wrong about that though. Bridge and many other applications embed the data directly into the images.

Because it's built on XML and has dynamic DTDs, we can specify any kind of data and embed that data portably into the file. This includes schema for videos, tifs, and all sorts of files. I think zenphoto has a great organizational backend and database. It now needs to extend to include many forms of media and media tagging schemas. If it does this, it can become the mama bear.

It would be relative easy to add XMP support to zenphoto since it would parallel or extend the current EXIF/IPTC handling. Just create an intermediate interface module that is passed the desired field. That module would then decide if the data was stored in the standard form or in XMP and invoke the appropriate library.

It just takes someone who is interested in this to do the work.

BTW: Adobe Bridge is quite happy to store the metadata in the traditional EXIF/IPTC fileds.