Questions - categories, IPTC and EXIF

[Michele01]

I am thinking on buying Photopost but before I need to have answered a few questions:

1) IPTC Support:

- is IPTC supported by default?
- Are the IPTC fields integrated into the photo post fields or is just the IPTC information shown?
- Which IPTC fields are supported?
- Is the IPTC information searchable?

2) EXIF Support

Is the EXIF data searchable?

3) categories

it is said that photo post supports multiple categories but there is no detailed information available on this topic.
- does multiple categories means unlimted categories (that would be extremly usefull)
- how do you asign a pic to multiple categories?
- is there an example where I can see how it does look like if a photo is assigned to multiple categories?

Thanks!

[Michael P]

1) We use JHEAD to extract IPTC and EXIF information; this third party utility available for both Windows and *nix systems is very efficent at extracting the different types of meta data contained in a JPEG.

2) No, we do not store the info in seperate fields, although it would be easy to add a condition to search the single field which does store the data.

3) Unlimited, yes. You can assign an image to multiple categories by enabling the feature and selecting additional categoires during upload (or edit). Only a single copy of the image is stored.

http://www.photopostdev.com/photopost/index.php allows for multiple category assignments; feel free to register for an account and give it a try.

[Michele01]

Thanks Michael for your reply. But when I upload photos to photopostdev there seem to be some limitations: First of all there seem to be no IPTC/EXIF support so I can't test it. I have to type Image name, keywords, decription manually, it's not taken from the IPTC fields. There aren't any fields for location, country, date pic was taken, copyright etc. So it's impossible to integrate those IPTC data into Photopost and make it searchable?

Then I can only choose two additional categories, it's not unlimited. So what to do if I have to assign a photo to 5 or even more categeories?

There are still quite a lot of questionmarks...

[Michael P]

I probably don't have EXIF extraction turned on that site; although you can see an example page at:

http://www.viperalley.com/gallery/sh...hp/photo/14769

and, correct, the filename, etc is NOT taken from exif information automatically (I didnt realize you were asking that). Since all cameras have their own formats, its my experience that you frequently have different field names for same items (i.e. no standards). As I said, EXIF/IPTC is not searched, but it could be.

I also misunderstood the selectable categories question - yes, you can have unlimited subcategories, but no, you can only select 2 additional cateogries. If you have 5, then you'd have to modify the code to accomidate you.

[Michele01]

Then Photopost ist probably not the right programme for me. I need a programme that fully supports IPTC. I use Imatch (www.photools.com) for my offline image admistration and with that programm I can apply keywords, image names (not equal to filenames!), caption, location, country, copyright etc. to a bunch of pics at once. So if you have full IPTC support that would mean that photopost fields would be filled with the IPTC data from the appropriate IPTC fields while uploading. As it is now I have to do it for every image manually. That's a lot of work since I have already more than 3000 pics in my offline database.

And since I have more than 3 categories assigned to each of my images in my offline database two additional categeories are simply not enough. That's not flexible enough to me. I am not familar with coding so I don't know if I was able to adapt the code to my needs.