Metadata: been discussing metadata and images a lot lately. In modern times, we tend to focus on EXIF data that digital cameras attach to image files, or the XMP data that rides along with images and layouts that go through an Adobe Creative Suite work flow.

Shooting digital, a ton of images come onto the HD, and who has time to add the information that makes them retrievable in the future? Not a new problem. When I worked for daily newspapers (a decade ago), I shot a few hundred pix a day, and we stored he negs in envelopes that we put in a drawer, filed by date. If you couldn't remember the date approximately, you could not easily find the negs.

If someone, say a lab worker, took the negs to make a print, and then misfiled them, maybe a year or two later, they were effectively lost. It would have to be very important to search all the negs that 10 photogs created in a 2- or 3-year span. That - lost negs - happened to me more than once.

A friend at work lent me his Nikon Cool Scan 4000 (the stepper motor in my Coolscan IV died last year). Every evening, I try to scan 5 to 10 of my old negs and transparencies. I'm trying not to make the mistakes that will make it hard to find these scans in the future. I'm trying to capture all the info I can.

Then, as now, catching info for a batch of negs in a shoot was a problem. Our elegant solution then was to put the assignment info on an envelope, and then put all the negs in the envelope. We used to punch the chosen neg on the edge with a train conductor's punch. Sometimes I'd ask another photog or picture editor to edit my shoot, and they would add punches - the neg with the most punches was the 'best' consensus picture - metadata, analog style.

We also used to file notches on the image mask in our Nikons: if you owned 4 bodies, 1 was usually in the shop and 3 were around your neck, and if a shutter curtain pinhole or other problem developed, you wanted to isolate the culprit right away. Those notches were metadata, too. Metadata capture is an old issue... the new tools capture a lot of stuff, date exposure etc., but still don't solve the problem. We need an easier way to capture meaningful metadata...
Comments 11:28:39 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures