[RNLD] photos and metadata

[Nick Thieberger]

Mark,

While not a complete solution to your current needs, ExSite9
(http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2013/02/fieldwork-helper-exsite9/)
does allow you to set up your own metadata categories and link them to
the filenames, creating an XML file of the metadata that can be
imported into an archive's catalog. It would be quicker than Excel in
that you can select a bunch of files and assign the same
characteristic to each of them. You can also clump them into higher
level groupings if you want, so that all images of a single event, for
example, could be described at that level as well as having individual
characteristics.

ExSite9 also shows you a thumbnail of the image file. We had hoped
that ExSite9 would also have done some nice things like harvest the
EXIF information from image files (including geographic information if
it is there), but that remains to be implemented in the next version.

I think that Saymore (http://saymore.palaso.org/) is also useful in
this way, but it is Windows only.

Nick


On 19 February 2013 19:03, Mark W. Post <markwpost at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear RNLD-ers,
>
> I'm currently sitting on about 3,000-odd still photographs taken over the
> years in the course of linguistic fieldwork; some are of me and my
> consultants sitting around having a glass of rice beer, but most are of
> culturally-significant items, flora/fauna, ritual paraphernalia, and the
> like. It now occurs to me that these should also be archived together with
> audio, video and text materials, and ELAR has agreed to take them, but holy
> mackerel - if entering metadata for 30 or 40 video files is laborious,
> imagine doing the same thing for 3,000 objects! I'm currently entering
> metadata in Excel, basically giving a filename, location and date taken,
> subject/description, and (if it's a single focal item, like a plant) names
> in whatever languages I happen to have id'ed the item for. But this is
> unbelievably time-taking, and I'm afraid that I'll only have time to get
> through all of this post-retirement. So my questions are these:
>
> (1) has anybody else done this sort of thing before, and if so, could you
> share your experiences
> (2) is there a metadata standard for still photographs which is broadly
> adhered-to (I'm not talking about things like lens used and aperture,
> obviously - I'm thinking of things more relevant to people like us)
> (3) does anyone know of any photo-management programs which can handle much
> or all of this work efficiently, i.e. organizing the photos, generating
> linked thumbnails, entering metadata in a field-based but exportable format,
> and building a sensible (and maybe keyword-searchable) directory structure.
> The sort of thing I have in mind is being able to search on "basket", and
> get everything tagged with this keyword returned.
>
> Maybe I'm asking too much, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who's ever
> thought about these sorts of things, and for all I know, there's already a
> good solution!
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Mark
>
> --
>
> Dr. Mark W. Post
> Universität Bern
> Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
> Länggassstrasse 49
> 3000 Bern 9
> Switzerland
>
> Tel +41 31 631 37 07
> Eml markwpost at gmail.com
> Web unibe-ch.academia.edu/MarkWPost
>