Microsoft hopes new photo tool will boost WindowsPro Photo Tools' originThe software is an outgrowth of the Microsoft Photo Info software the company released in 2007 to help photographers label some images with metadata such as copyright notices, captions, and titles, but it's expanded considerably.The software can process data from a handheld GPS unit that shows where a photographer roamed, adding the latitude and longitude data to photos depending on where they were taken. That's how existing geotagging software typically works, but Pro Photo Tools has some more distinguishing features, too. For one thing, it also lets photographers assign locations to photos by placing pushpins on an online map. For another, it adds rough geographic coordinates based just on a region name, such as "Boston". It can work with many of the proprietary "raw" image formats that higher-end digital cameras produce. And perhaps most significant, it uses Microsoft's Windows Live Local interface to add text fields such as region, city, and street to the photo. We tried a pre-production version of the software and found it rough around the edges but a refreshingly thorough attempt to tackle the geotagging challenge. One of our favorite features is a slider that let us correct for discrepancies between the camera time and our GPS unit's time. We had some problems on Windows XP with the software showing being unable to show larger versions of the photos and some other problems writing geodata to Canon's CR2 raw files. Weisberg said both problems have been fixed, and it worked fine with Nikon's NEF format. To run the software on Windows XP, users must have installed the Windows Imaging Component, the image-handling engine built for Vista but also available for Windows XP. WIC is likely to become more mainstream soon on XP: it's built into Service Pack 3. One nice feature of WIC is that raw-image processing engines called codecs can be plugged in. Unlike Adobe and Apple, Microsoft relies on camera makers to supply the codecs for their formats. That means the company is wedded to them for support, but the major manufacturers all have released codecs, and relying on the manufacturer means Microsoft doesn't have to worry as much that writing data to raw files will corrupt them. One annoyance for us was the lack of a free codec to handle Adobe's Digital Negative (DNG) format. A company called ArdFry Imaging offers one for US$29.95, but that seemed like a lot to pay for a plug-in for a free tool. Happily, Adobe plans to fill in the DNG codec gap. "We'll be releasing a DNG codec shortly," said Lightroom leader Tom Hogarty in an email. That will help out other Microsoft software such as Windows Photo Gallery that uses WIC to show image thumbnails and print photos. One shortcoming, though, comes with Sony's codec, which doesn't let people write metadata such as keywords or geotags to its raw files. |
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