Pictures database and library mode; scan EXIF and IPTC metadata tags into a SQL db

As an extension to a previous suggestion of being able to "read" EXIF data from photos, it might also be cool to be able to "scan" a directory of pictures, as we do for music and videos, extract that EXIF data and then provide a library view of images.

The advantages to this is we can provide some nice "views" of the photo library, such as grouping by date or keyword data, and being able to search photos on keywords. Most of the good photo management software uses the EXIF keyword field, and the date is already populated by digital cameras. Geotag info would also provide pretty cool filtering options.

You could then use this database of pics to populate a screensaver with a "playlist" of photos, of sunsets, for example.

Should be pretty simple to do given the library code is already there for music and videos, and EXIF data is a well documented format.

I posted a request just like this on SF and few months ago.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php...tid=581841

From the little research I've done it looks like you need to read the IPTC data to get information like keywords and captions which is entered by the user while the EXIF data holds the information written by the camera (F-stop, shutter-speed, etc.)

Here is a site on IPTC:
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imag...c_naa.html

Also, free programs like IrfanView read and write IPTC data.
http://www.irfanview.com/

While it would be great to sort by the EXIF data I believe the Keywords have much greater potential. I have spent the last 4 weeks adding kewords to over 7,000 photos in our collection and using a site called smugmug.com I can upload all the photos and find anything via keywords. It's very cool! I'm willing to share my site address in private to anyone looking to research more on this subject.

I believe this would be a great addition to XBMC and perfect for the next project since 2.0 is out. With that said, I'm not a programer (big surprise right) So it's up to a programer to take this on, but I'm read to help in any way I can and I would like to hear from others that would like this feature!

Thanks for your time.

Well, doesn't look like many people are interested in this feature.....

Without more user support I don't see this moving into XBMC, too bad I think it could be great for anyone with a large photo collection.

Thanks

If you look in the other thread, more people are interested. often others don't know they are until they see the feature.
This is a must

then by all means, submit a patch

I had to give this a little push back to the top just to see if the development team had any interest or thoughts about this feature.

Thanks again.

I'm not a developer, but I have an interest in the IPTC keywords scanning. I just recently started adding keywords as well since I use Picasa on my PC and the search works great. It basically creates virtual albums for you. Now I wish I had the ability to do this in XBMC since the photos look much better on my 52" RPTV for slideshows. I don't see any benefit (for me) in scanning the exif info, except possibly the date. Perhaps it will get added someday.

Here is an open source application that may help....

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Not sure what else I can do without the support of a developer and I'm not even sure how big of a job this would be.

On the side of user support, I think this feature would work very well as part of a media center.

G'day all

Did a quick search and didn't see anything so please feel free to point me if this request exists. I have both a 360 & XBMC and the thing I love (the only thing actually about the 360 media center cababilites) is connecting to Vista MEdia Center and viewing the photos on the TV. The main benefit of this is my photo collection is organised using Tags rather than organsied by folders. ie a Folder may contain 100 images but those images are tagged as Holiday, Family etc and can be sorted and viewed based on these tags on the 360. Is there any way this type of funtionality could be added to the XBMC Pictures feature set?

As usual thanks to all involved in this project. IT is a truely AWESOME piece of software!!!