Friday, January 26, 2007 7:08 AM
Microsoft has released a great new tool for working with digital photos. Photo Info adds shell extensions to improve the tooltip hover for photos, and adds a context menu item to work with photos individually or in groups. You can manipulate all common EXIF and IPTC tags, and it even has very flexible date manipulation features built-in.
Why date manipulation? I had a camera a few years ago that would lose the time on every battery replace! Of course I didn't always reset it, so I had many shots taken January 1, 2000. More recently, my wife went to Guatemala with a group and then they all shared photos. Date manipulation allowed me to sync up everyone's photos temporally. I used a standalone date manipulator, but this would have been so much better!
I like that author and location information is saved in history, so on every photo you can use a drop-down list to select previous entries (or enter new ones). It updates no image info (no worries about recompression) -- just metadata. It handles JPEG, TIFF, WDP, HDP (HD Photo), NEF (Nikon RAW), CR2, and CRW (Canon RAW).
I installed it last night, and my biggest complaint is speed. Startup takes around ten seconds, and closing it (applying changes) is close to a minute. I haven't restarted yet, so maybe something needs to be updated. I can't imagine that's normal, or it should never have been released!
I'm a big Picasa convert, largely because they are so good at preserving image info, and updating metadata tags (not just in their internal database). It's nice to have a lite tool sometimes though, and the built-in time features are wonderful. Now all Microsoft has to do is update support for Orientation in XP. Even this tool doesn't properly display the images!
Link to Microsoft Photo Info