image tags for richer active playlists

[Olli-Pekka Isola]

Dear developers,

I like active playlists. They work well with music files which have faily static list of tags. Unfortunately, Mezzmo doesn't cope well with image files. Mezzemo supports really limited number of tags. Image files tend to have numerous different tags, EXIF, IPTC, XMP or JFIF tags.

Few posters have raised this matter earlier. Here's few for starters:

http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/2394-Supprt-for-pictures-metadata
http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/2064-win-7-image-rating-amp-image-metadata-for-smart-playlists
http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/5794-JPEG-tags

I suggest that you make Mezzmo smarter with images. I think that Mezzmo should read ANY tag it finds from an image file and should make tag available to active playlists. The three most wanted categories of tags are:

- date and time
- location (address, GPS)
- people (Picasa and Windows Photo Gallery don't use the same tags, too bad!)

Anyhow, people aren't same. So, fixed list of supported tags will not work. Hence, the tag reading, storage and active playlist variable list should be all dynamic. It is acceptable that Mezzmo establishes image tag names as it comes across a new ones.

I agree that reading tags may become complicated. Luckily, there is a good library that may help you to get there. Take a look at ExifTool (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) by Phil Harvey.

I have thousands of photos waiting to be shared to family members. This proposed feature would make Mezzmo a perfect platform for image sharing.

I hope I have convinced you to take this decisibe step that differentiates you from the rest!


Kind regards,
Olli-Pekka Isola

[Paul]

Hi Olli-Pekka,

Many thanks for the detailed suggestion. We (mostly) agree with your thoughts and we do have this already in our development plans. It's just a matter of priorities when we implement it. We're finishing up Mezzmo v4.0 at the moment and once that is done, then we will plan the feature list for the next major version.

If you wish, you can email us a selection of photos that have EXIF, XMP & JFIF tags and we will use them in our development and testing. Email them to us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com. If your email is larger than 10MB, then please upload the photos to a filesharing site like dropbox, mega.co.nz, skydrive, etc. and email us the download link.

[Olli-Pekka Isola]

Hi Paul,

Nice to hear that you consider this enhancement request! There are two alternative libraries to ExifTool. Here are the links to them. I post them in the hope that it will make you easier to jump in. :-)

Exiv2
http://dev.exiv2.org/

jhead
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/


Kind regards,
Olli-Pekka

[Paul]

Many thanks, Olli-Pekka. The new image metadata tags will not make it into the upcoming Mezzmo v4.0, but we will certainly consider it for the following version.