Update IPTC with changes made via the web UI
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November 09, 2008, 11:13 PM
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Hi, My name is Dan Dascalescu and I maintain the Comparison of photo sharing websites section on Wikipedia. One of the features I have not seen in any photo sharing service, and would give 23hq an edge, is to ensure synchronization between the IPTC tag and the meta-information stored in the site's database. For example, when a user adds a tag to a photo, or edits its caption, those changes should be written back to the IPTC header. Fotki, Flickr, Picasa and others don't do that, and information stored on the web gets out of synch with what's stored in the photo's IPTC header. When the user downloads their own photos (e.g. when using the photo service as a backup), their changes made via the web interface will be lost. Can 23hq be the first to provide this feature? All the best,
Dan Dascalescu
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Team 23
November 10, 2008, 06:49 AM
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Hey Dan,
We've discussed internally whether we wanted to do this -- the problem is that we run into a dilemma: Do we want to modify the user's original photos? Our answer has always been No. This means that we don't rotate originals and that we don't write IPTC/EXIF information back to the photos. It's a concious choice, but I'd love to hear from people if they agree with our assessment.
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November 10, 2008, 08:58 AM
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I like the idea of editing IPTC info. Since the photos I upload are 'copies', I'm not especially concerned about maintaining their originality. In this vein I'd also occasionally appreciate other people writng to my IPTC fields, in a folksonomic sort of way.
There might also be a question of what to do when I want to add new or different tag info to the original. If I upload that, does it replace the earlier photo on 23? If not, the ability to permanently edit the online photos is pretty useful.
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November 10, 2008, 09:35 AM
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Whether to touch or not user's photos is an interesting point. I'm curious about practical implications of touching the photos. One would be that the user has some backup/sync software with 23hq as a repository, and that software's hashes will mismatch with the ones from the updated photos from 23hq... But that's quite unlikely: 23hq doesn't support FTP or some sort of virtual file system (AFAIK), and the user could just say "OK, this file has legitimately changed" (as they should, if they really want to keep their local photos in sync).
Note that this depends on filenames being faithfully preserved. Fotki has the very nasty habit of eating up dashes and replacing perfectly legal characters with underscores, then truncating the filename to 34 chars. I haven't test 23 on that yet.
In any case, let's see if there are some compelling scenarios where touching the user's photos would be a bad idea. And after all, there could be a signup checkbox about that: "Do you have any specific need for photos to NOT be updated as you update their tags and captions?"
HTH,
Dan
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