[Gimp-developer] getting 2.4 out of the door

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 1/19/07, Raphaël Quinet wrote:

> - The metadata editor works with XMP, which is a superset of the other
>   metadata formats and can be extended easily.  So instead of keeping
>   the EXIF block in memory and fetching values from it on request (as
>   done by libexif and most other libraries), the tags in the EXIF
>   block are read one by one and converted immediately to XMP.

Does it mean that tags will be written back to EXIF when saving to
JPEG/TIFF/PNG?

> On the other hand, it is written in C++
> instead of C and it is licensed under the GPL only.

This is not 100% correct.

http://www.exiv2.org/whatsnew.html#item4

> Sure.  But as mentioned above, many of these messages are specific to
> EXIF and may be irrelevant or inappropriate when the metadata is
> converted to XMP.  The messages that refer to the specific encodings
> used by EXIF (rational numbers, date formates, etc.) would have to be
> replaced by different messages in the metadata editor.  Besides, there
> are many other properties in XMP that are not part of EXIF and would
> have to be described, translated, etc.  This includes the Dublin Core
> properties, the license-related stuff (Creative Commons, etc.)...
> Although it would be possible to fetch some of the tag descriptions
> from the library and have all other descriptions in the editor itself,
> I am not sure about how much work would be saved by that.

I see. Thank you for the explanation.

Alexandre