A gentle plea for organization
James O’Neill follows up his article ‘IE6 must die’ with wise words about the importance of keeping pictures and their description together to make sure treasured memories are preserved.
A gentle plea for organization
I flinch when I use the word “Metadata”. I sense people rolling their eyes and thinking “here we go: another trip down jargon alley”. Meta- is used to indicate “higher level or second order kind” meta-data is data ABOUT the data – in simple terms file properties.
I doubt if librarians say “metadata” but they understand it. A book has 3 natural properties: Author, Title and Publisher; consider, for a moment, the usability of a reference library where shelves are arranged by any one of these and you’ll understand need for the Dewey Decimal Classification system – which tags books by what they are broadly about. Some people call such tagging classifications “taxonomies” another word which makes me flinch – it just means something tabulated, (“taxi” and “taxes” come from the same root – they relate to tables of charges).
Disk file systems have a few core properties for every file – a name (which usually had an extension part identifying the format of the data), the date when the data changed, and a location in the file system’s hierarchy. Classification implies location and vice versa – as with library books. Unfortunately, where the Dewey system works in many libraries from one year to the next, the folder structure created by someone else (or even your past self) can be a mystery: any decent size library needs a catalogue and so does a modern hard drive. Cue search.
Search relies on indexing text – but not all text is equal. HTML has a <META> tag which tells search engines “this is the description”, “these are keywords” and so on. Office documents have had Author, Title, Keyword-Tags, Description and other properties since the early 1990s. Non-textual files can have textual metadata: MP3 and WMA files both have the ability to store Track Title, Album, Performer and Writer information (and more). Enter a musician’s name in the search box on Windows 7 or Vista and you find their songs in your music collection. Pictures, in TIFF, JPG and some RAW file formats store technical and descriptive information, (known as EXIF data) which Windows can index and search.
But things go wrong with pictures. At a recent event I heard a speaker complaining that he had catalogued his photos with iPhoto, and then realised the drawback of having the information in a proprietary database. He looked for an alternative but only Adobe Lightroom and one open source program used EXIF. The reference to iPhoto suggested using Windows Explorer was not an option for him. But there are many cataloguing programs for Windows which do the job less well than Explorer: quite a few are supplied with cameras.
Windows 7 Explorer – Top right: searching by free text and in specific meta-data fields
Middle left: found items with hit highlighting and live icons
Middle right: preview, and bottom details pane viewing and setting information for multiple items
Windows XP gave explorer the ability to show and set properties of photos and other files. It was improved in Windows Vista and again with Windows 7; both make it easier to view and set properties, search through them and create virtual folders using them: with properties catalogued, files don’t need to be arranged by their location, any more than a library catalogue would be arranged by the Dewey numbers which determine shelf position.
Indexing gives immediate rewards for entering EXIF tags. The speaker I mentioned was interested in the long term, and it has concerned me too. Photographic prints, negatives and slides often come with pieces of additional contextual information: the note scribbled on the back, the letter wrapped round a precious family photo and so on – they are meta-data. Valued pictures are preserved and handed down – studio pictures from Victorian times are useful to family historians today and even with family snapshots from the 20th century there is a good chance that pictures come with something informative (even something like “Holiday, Norfolk 1971” on the packet) . Will people bother to preserve Digital photos? And will there be information for their children and grandchildren to refer to? I’m quite optimistic on the first part – we share digital photos and tend to keep all our old data as we upgrade computers, hard disks keep getting bigger making room for it. But I’m sure that information about the picture will only survive if it stays with the picture. With cataloguing programs – however good they seem – I’d test setting a title and keyword tag and prefer a program which stores data in the photo over one which doesn’t. If a program stores picture data only in its own database it means:
1. You can only search for pictures from the program itself, not from a Windows Search
2. When you share pictures they will lose their data
3. You can’t change software unless the new software reads the database (which is unlikely)
4. If the database stays with the images, will a future generation be able to read it?
If prints are rarer than in days of film, they may be cherished (rather than files), never underestimate the power of the note written on the back!
