Mapping Priority/Urgency into Ratings

[digitalpro]

We've added Ratings (the currently in favor 1-5 star version) to our DAM software, DigitalPro, but are curious what default policy most photographers who already have IPTC Priorities/Urgency tags on their images would want us to follow for making them ratings. For example we could:

* Use 1-5 Urgency as 5-1 stars, ignore the rest

* Map them some other way

and we could also

* Keep both systems around for folks who prefer one or the other or

* Just move to a Ratings system and more or less ignore the Urgencies

Thoughts?--David Cardinal
http://www.proshooters.com
http://www.nikondigital.org

[peterkrogh]

Dave,
I'd suggest that you support the ratings through XMP for file formats that support XMP.  You could make some kind of translation utility (like Rank and File) to write ratings to Urgency for files that don't support XMP, such as proprietary RAW files. 

If you were to take this approach, ideally, you would have some kind of user preferences that would let the user decide how to use Urgency, either as a definable label, or as a rating, or as some combination.
Peter

[digitalpro]

Peter--No question Ratings will be supported through XMP. That's a no-brainer. The question though goes to the other part of your response, which is what is the best way to map Urgency into Ratings. We'd rather not clutter up the interface with another slew of options if there is a good general solution about what to do with existing Urgency values, how best to map them, and frankly whether we need to continue to support the larger number of values Urgency provides separate from the 5 levels of "star" Rankings.--David

[peterkrogh]

What does DigitalPro currently do with the Urgency field?

Also, there is a significant problem if you are trying to attach Ratings to proprietary RAW, like NEF or CR2.  The file format does not support them as embedded metadata.  You can store it as sidecar data, but that can be problematic as well.

Does DigitalPro support attaching Ratings to RAW?
Peter

[digitalpro]

Peter--We're all too familiar with the foibles of NEF & CR2 files (we've been viewing & captioning Raw files for 5 years now, since DigitalPro 1.1).

We store Urgency, along with all other IPTC fields directly in NEF files and in some Canon Raw files (depends on the format whether we can embed the data). For other Raw files the data is kept in a database & a sidecar.

We don't mind continuing to write that info if it is needed & relevant, but back to my main question, it's whether we need to keep both separately for different uses, or we can map Urgency into Rating and transition it, or just use Ratings, etc.--David

[peterkrogh]

So the question might be stated:
Does anyone use Urgency to hold information that is not rating information, and do you need to keep it?

What applications use Urgency other than iView? 

Can you merge XMP sidecar data?  IOW, if a file comes in with and XMP sidecar, and you change ratings, will you write it back to the sidecar and preserve all existing data?  If so, it would be less necessary to write to IPTC Urgency.

A lot of this consideration will depend on which other applications use Urgency, and how many collections have a lot of work locked up there.  I know iView users would want you to preserve Urgency settings distinctly from Ratings, since you can have entirely independent information stored there.
Peter

[digitalpro]

Peter--Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head. DigitalPro, of course, uses Urgency as part of our IPTC support, so we're polling our users to see what they want. Beyond that, a good question, and part of the reason I posted here. I know it has been part of the IPTC spec forever, but I don't know how aggressively it has been used.

And yes, we've built the software to "merge" the IPTC & XMP data, but that's where the odd fact that Urgency has slightly more capability then Ratings comes in, so there is a tradeoff between preserving all the functionality vs. having a nice clean interface that just looks forward to the future. Which is even separate from the question of whether users actually want two different fields or just one.

Thanks for the heads up that Urgency may never have seen much use. If others on the forums have been using Urgency, please let us know your thoughts.--David

[peterkrogh]

David,
Is DigitalPro scriptable?  THis would let different users migrate the data in any number of ways that might work for legacy files.
Peter

[digitalpro]

That's a thought, although I'd really like to keep things simple if we can come up with a use case or two that solves the majority of problems. Part of the real strength of DigitalPro is that we've made it comprehensible to photographers without requiring them to do scripting or a lot of tweaking. --David

[johnbeardy]

David

While I can understand your not wanting to make the program depend on scripting, I'd definitely investigate adding an automation object. You'll never build in all the things users want, and scripting will let people extend the program for themselves as well - all you need is one or two pointy heads to emerge out of your user base. But in the context of migration, data never comes into a program without needing to be hacked and scripting makes it much less painful.

iMatch has the best Windows solution, using Sax Basic which I think is open source, and this gives it its own built in scripting window and the most complete automation object. iView and Portfolio both allow you to automate lots of stuff too.

John

[peterkrogh]

David,
Beardy is one of those pointy heads himself, and what he says has a lot of merit.  If implemented correctly, scripting capability can look just like any built-in functionality to the user: just another menu item to invoke.

This can unleash the application to deal with new or unusual data mapping challenges (or other functionality requests) in a way that requires no work by the development team, and no waiting for future versions to release (once the ability to script has been incorporated into the app.)

It also becomes a wonderful proving ground for new ideas that can be incorporated into future versions as core functionality.

Peter

[digitalpro]

I'd be the last person to knock scripting, since we make tremendous use of scripting of both Photoshop (to drive Camera Raw right from our interface) and Office (to create Delivery Memos & Stock File lists in word right from DigitalPro), so I'm on board with all your thoughts in terms of the flexibility and power.

In fact, I really wish Capture NX or Bibble were scriptable like Photoshop. Nikon/nik go so far as to obfuscate their entry points, which is about as scripting hostile as you can get, unfortunately.

There does however seem to be an increase in complexity that comes along for the ride with many applications when scripting is added. The trick will be avoiding that part!--David