Tags in Media Center photo gallery
Speaking of new features… In the most recently released build you’ll find a new ‘pivot’ in the our photo library. It’s the ‘tags’ pivot and enables you to see your photos grouped by tags.
This is what tags look like in the Windows Photo Gallery:
photogallery Hosted on ZooomrAnd this is what they look like in Media Center:
mediacentertags Hosted on ZooomrIn the comments to a recent post I believe Peter Near asked for more improvements to be made to the photos experience. What would you like to see in the next version of Media Center (not Vista, the one after :) ).
Update: Someone asked if WMP supports this and they do (since we use WMP as the data store for pictures). Oddly they’re called tags in Photo Gallery and Media Center but keywords in Media Player. Here’s a screenshot:
wmpkeywords Hosted on ZooomrAnd yes, the tags are written back to the picture and are transportable. It’d be great to see Zooomr, Flickr, etc all rally around the same standard.
Matt,
Glad you asked! I would love to be able to edit tags and give the image a title to replace “IMG000001.JPG” that shows up unless you use Photo Gallery to enter a title. Also, I would like to be able to enter tags when importing photos into Media Center similar to how the photo importer works now.
Btw, I love the new tags integration into Media Center. I hope you can add a few more improvements in the next go round.
Hear, Hear…. i did notice that tag pivot and it will become a very useful way to view pics in the future…
Unfortuneately now that it exists i will have to get ready to use it by adding creative tags to all my pics… ho hum if it ain’t MP3 tags it will be jpg tags… what is my life coming to :)
Are there any best practice/standardish tags used in the world of picture tagging or is it a free for all?
If I can leave my requests too…. :)
I would like to be able to edit photo attributes and a better import mechanism.
Also, I don´t use the photo print function because it only prints a full page photo. If I could choose among a couple of different sizes it would be perfect. A lot of times some relative ask for a copy of the photo and I have to go to my notebok so I can prin it right.
Tags in Windows Media Center
Windows Vista’s Media Center offers up yet another neat feature for managing and viewing your photos
Windows Media Player 11 should also support tags?
Peter Near!! Can you clarify….
“embed the tags in the image as iptc metadata rather than / in addition to the vista metadata.”
Are you saying that the tags arent stored in the pics but somewhere in Vista/WMP11!!! That sucks… I dont want to spend years tagging pics to find out that at my next clean build they are all gone…..!
Very cool stuff Matt. A couple of questions. How portable will the Vista tags be? Will they automatically import into Flickr/Zooomr and other photo sharing websites? Or if not by default is there something we can write on our end to ensure these tags get autotagged on people’s photos if they want this?
Are you guys doing any work with geotagging photos? It would be great to have a tool similar to what Zooomr’s got where you could bulk geotag your photos at the desktop level.
No, that’s not the case. Tags are not stored in the system, they are stored with the pictures themselves, not locked in a proprietary store. As for Flikr etc, last time I checked they have their own tagging system, but hopefully with tagging built into the OS, they will start to crack the photos and read the metadata off the photos. Start your tagging.
To be honest (and keep in mind I’m not the photos program manager, though I share an office with him) I don’t see us improving editting and import that much. Personally, I feel that these tasks are best suited to doing at your desktop and that in Media Center we should provide some basic functionality so you can complete those scenarios but our UI would become overburden if we were to replicate most or all of the desktop functionailty at 10′. Now geotagging on the other hand is pretty exciting and to be able to browse geotagged photos natively within MCE would be something I’d like to see.
In terms of browsing geotagged photos in MCE take a look at an MCE add-in that I created a while back. It’s still in it’s initial stages and I have plans to update it especially for the Vista version of MCE.
http://www.codeproject.com/bitmap/VirtualEarthMCE.asp
Cheers
Matt, I talked to Kristopher earlier today about ensuring that MSFT tags could be read by Zooomr when photos are uploaded. He sounded like he thought it would be pretty easy to do. We’d love to make sure that Zooomr works well with Vista’s tags of course.
As for the geotagging thing. Yes, this is very cool. Even cooler in some ways for a photo sharing site than a desktop app. One of my favorite things about Zooomr is that when you geotag a photo it shows you the nearest other photos to that photo. We’ve also got a section called new geotagged photos from your region on our welcome mat where you can see the most recent photos near you uploaded. Right now if you click through to see more photos than are on the welcome mat it doesn’t quite work right (it sends you to all geotagged photos) but we will fix this shortly.
Discovering new photographers shooting in your neighborhood is a great way to add community.
Of course the easier we can all make it for people to geotag the better. I haven’t played around with Sean’s app yet but that sounds promising. Zooomr uses Google maps right now for geotagging but the process to geotag and especially batch geotag in Zooomr 2 now is super super easy.
It would be great to see a desktop app that worked that well for geotagging though before shots ever made it to Zooomr or Flickr or wherever else.
We do of course want to build something for MCE with Zooomr when the time is right. We still have too many basic things to fix first before getting our 10′ UI down, but I’d think that if we could integrate a Zooomr plug in for MCE that it might be cool for people to see new photos in their region (and hopefully as well with various quality filters in place as our user base expands) directly from MCE.
Exciting stuff.
Slightly off-topic, but to be honest, the main tags feature I want in Vista Media Center is for it to recognise tags from mp3s correctly. XP MCE is awful at working out the artist/album for a track, and usually when I go to an artist pivot for an artist that I have 8-10 albums for, it might list 2 of them if I’m lucky. Quite often it lists none. The others might be available under the ’songs’ section, if the Gods are smiling.
I’m sure the excuse is the tags in the mp3 files, but every other music organising app I’ve ever tried (including WMP) manages to read and understand the tags just fine. It seems to be some confusion between the ‘Artist’ and ‘Album Artist’ tags, but tbh I don’t care, as like most people, I just want it to work. Even my own app that I knocked up one evening to try some stuff out could manage it - and I just used the WMP component to read the tags!
Of course, XP MCE is so slow as a music database that I almost never use it, but when I do, the fact that I can’t even find the music without going to the ‘All songs’ view and typing the name on the remote just means I feel like using it even less.
Case in point - I ripped a CD the other day using WMP. The album shows up in MCE, but with only 3 of the 12 tracks showing. (This was with WMP11, which admittedly is a beta, but I get the same thing from mp3s ripped with WMP10, iTunes, RealJukebox, etc.)
I wish this would be able to integrate with Photoshop Elements’ tagging feature, since I don’t particularly feel like tagging all my pictures over again.
Matt, I haven’t tried Vista yet on my MCE at home, but plan to for RC1. Are the ratings or autoplaylists supported in the music player? If I want to play 4-5 star songs, can I do it?
As a professional photo I rely on EXIF info very heavily. While XP does have some EXIF elements, it is not complete. I would love to be able to view the complete EXIF profile from within MCE.
A few more ‘consumer’ oriented items around photos and tags could include:
- Publish items to web slideshow. See Photoshop’s galleries here, but add customization.
- Publish to Powerpoint or PDF slideshow.
- From within MCE, sort by (date taken, size, name, tag, etc)
I’m currently using PhotoshopElements 4 to catalog my pictures. Tagging is very easy there but lacks 2 things.
Tags are NOT saved in pictures stored on a network drive. This is clearly a bug but a very annoying one since i store all my pics on a NAS-drive.
When tags are altered by an external program, PSE does not pic up these changes.
I’m very happy to see that WPG has solved these 2 issues for me.
It was fairly easy to Add my NAS-drive to the list of Watched folders in WPG. And i was amazed to see that it also found the tags that where already in there.
Some questions.
* what about Hierarchical tags Like
People > Family > Wife will that be supported. I know that PSE saves 3 tags/keywords in that case but i believe that XMP-format does not allow to define the relationship between the tags so when viewing them in an external program the hierarchy is lost. Picajet solves this by saving the 3 tags but also an extra tag like ‘People/Family/Wife’ so that the hierarchy is not lost. Will WPG support something similar?
* what about reading IPTC/EXIF info, will that be supported? I don’t need to be able to Write in these meta-areas because EXIF contains Camera info, and IPTC is soon to be replaced by XMP i guess.
* Another nice thing would be to have WPG hide pictures tagged ‘Private’ (like you can in the Screensaver). This would make that i don’t have to be afraid to show my wife’s nude pictues to appear in WPG when showing pictures to my parents ;)
* Is there a feature list or development forum or RSS feed that i can subscribe to in order to stay up-to-date on WPG changes?
[...] Show Times: 00:44 Coming up this week 00:55 Email about my Vista XBOX 360 Extender 03:04 The video was been watch 40,000 times! 04:00 Blog of the week Matt Goyer, photo tags in Vista 04:56 A list of new features for Vista Media Center 05:27 S1Digital’s new show room 06:03 Waterproof outdoor MCE PC 06:43 A Message from OneVoice 07:30 Welcome to Michael Wolf 07:40 Michael’s background 09:02 Changes in the last 6 years 10:40 Content providers v Carriers 13:00 CableCard on Media Center 15:28 Media Center in the home 16:44 Extender Devices, Media Center Partner Program 20:00 VIIV and AMD Live! 26:00 Effects on the Gaming 28:00 Sony PS3 28:58 Blueray v HD-DVD 32:10 Home Theater rooms 34:34 Vista 37:40 Longtail content on the TV 38:38 Online Spotlight, TVTonic 42:47 Play out with my music at iandixon.co.uk [...]
Tags in Media Center photos
A few days ago I complained about not being able to categorize photos in Vista Media Center using me
What exactly is Photo Gallery?
It keeps trying to load and then I get an error message. Then it tries again, over and over again, until you shut Media Center down. Any thoughts would be MOST welcomed. Thanks!
Just a quick question relating to tags. I’m using Vista RC1 (build 5600) and I love the tagging within Photo Gallery plus the neat way I can automatically import pics from my phone on connection (even dumping them to a network location, with tags already).
However, unless I’m missing something obvious, is there a way to make Media Center refresh its list of tags?
I only seem to have the initially applied tag (from when I imported pics from my phone) and not any tags I’ve since added within Photo Gallery. The help is a little thin on this (not surprisingly, I guess, as it’s a fairly advanced topic and the help isn’t finalised…) I wondered if the Media Center Optimization would fix it - it doesn’t seem to have (although again I’m not 100% sure it actually ran the optimization!)
Other than that, it’s great… Just be sure to really push these features - they make the system rock and people will love them if they know it’s possible.
Neil
The IPTC standard does support a lot of meta-data for photos. Unfortunatly WMP 11 only support the data field “Keyword” of IPTC. But there a lot of other usefull data fields, like country, state, city, place of shot, author.
It would be great, when WMP 11 supports the other data fields of IPTC too and VMC could use it for more views of the picture library.
And, I want see a tag cloud within VMC of my used tags stored in my photos. :-)
Best Regards
André from Germany
I love media center but its driving me mad.I have applyed tags to all my photos in photo gallery which works fine but many of my tagged photo’s don’t show up in media player and center under the tags display.Any Advice would be much appreciated!
Many thanks
Andy
I really appreciate photos more with this gallery. Its such a brilliant idea to tag together photos of same interest. Thanks for sharing!