If a world famous search engine wanted some good publicity...

...they could help owners of copyright in images track down their "orphaned" works.

A hot news story in the UK in recent days has been the passing of a law to allow photographs to be published without the copyright owner's consent, provided a "diligent search" has been undertaken to find the owner. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406

Many photographers are careful to embed "metadata" within their photographs that explicitly declares the ownership of the image, but many online publishers (e.g. Facebook and the BBC) strip all such metadata from the "user generated content" they publish. This is probably excusable, since it's the only practical way to avoid the risk of obscene or libellous material being secreted in the metadata. By the way, if you're looking for an easy to use program to add metadata to your own photographs, I recommend Photini (what I wrote).

Apparently the new law makes it the photographer's responsibility to discover re-publication of his or her images and then to apply for payment from a central fund. The only problem is, how do you find out if one of your images has been re-published? I recently did a Google image search for my name, and found two instances of photographs I'd uploaded to Flickr being used without my permission. In one case the image was credited to me, in the other they'd included my name in their image file name. (In both cases, had they asked, I'd have said yes.)

With Google's huge database of Internet published images, and a bit of image processing software, they could make it much easier to find instances of an image being re-published elsewhere on the web where the perpetrator hasn't made it quite so easy to spot the theft. They already detect web pages with similar text, to reduce their pagerank on the assumption it's copied boilerplate text, so why not find very similar images in the same way? This would also help those performing a "diligent search" to find the true author of an image, rather than simply allowing them to assume it's an "orphan work".

Editing photograph metadata

A much neglected task for any photographer is labelling one's photographs. In the old days one could write on the back of a print, but as I always preferred slide film this wasn't an option. So I created a database in which I stored a simple title and description of each slide. However, as it would often take me many months to finish a film it was sometimes unclear when and where any particular picture was taken. So I've finished up with too many slides labelled "somewhere in France".

In this age of electronic photography everything should be so much easier. There are standardised ways of storing information about the image in the image file itself. This so-called metadata is then permanently attached to the photograph. It doesn't fade or get lost when a database crashes. What's more, online services such as Flickr can use this metadata to label photographs when you upload them, saving you the trouble of writing it all again. And with photos being loaded into a computer within hours of taking them there's no excuse for forgetting any details.

On my Windows XP computer I have an easy to use metadata editing program called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. Surprisingly Microsoft seem to have discontinued it, as there is no Windows 7 version.

The screenshot shows the key features. I load a group of images, typically one day's photos, whose thumbnails are displayed in the lower half of the GUI. After selecting one or more of the images I type metadata into the boxes in the upper half. Switching to the "map browse" tab I can drag and drop images to a map to set their location data. This really is a simple to use program that should have been more heavily promoted.

Since choosing Linux as the operating system for my main computer I've been looking for a suitable photo metadata editing program. None that I've tried has the required features. For example, some only allow you to label one picture at a time and others have a very cluttered interface that has too much technical detail. So I've decided to write my own.

As you can see, I've borrowed some of the look and feel from Photo Tools. I'm writing the software in Python, as that's what I know, and I'm using PyQt to create the GUI. Python has a very good library to read and write metadata called pyexiv2. My program is still at a very early stage of development but I'm very pleased with how it's coming along. I've even managed to load Google maps into the GUI.

My only difficulty has been in getting my head round the multiplicity of metadata standards - EXIF, IPTC and XMP. Some data, such as title or copyright info, can be stored in all three. I've decided to try and make my program follow Postel's law so it will read data from any standard and write to all three. This should maximise its compatibility with other programs.

Needless to say, when it becomes usable I'll be making it available as open source. Watch this space.

Edit 2012/09/26: early version is now available from github: http://github.com/jim-easterbrook/Photini

plustek OpticFilm 7300 film scanner

I'm not an avid photographer, but have still managed to accumulate over 2800 35mm slides before I bought my first digital camera in September 2003. These have been sitting in a couple of shoe boxes, slowly decaying, for up to 30 years. A few weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and transfer them to modern, indestructible, digital form.

A bit of web searching suggested there are three classes of film scanners on the market: cheap & nasty, twice the price but OK, and 30 times the price & out of my league. I soon decided against the cheap & nasty category. If I'm going to spend many hours scanning all my slides, I'd rather not have to do it twice.

The mid range in scanners appears to be dominated by plustek's OpticFilm series. After comparing the different models, I chose the OpticFilm 7300 model as it has slightly better dynamic range and is faster than the base models, and I feel I can do without the infra red dust detection of the more expensive models.

Since buying the scanner I've scanned just over 500 of my slides, starting with the very first picture I took with my Zenith E - a big, clunky, Russian made SLR I bought in 1978. I'd previously catalogued all my slides, giving each one a 4 digit number, so scanning them in order seems the most sensible way to proceed. The picture above is slide 0038, taken in my parents' garden in 1978.

Now would seem to be a good time to record some of my experiences with the slide scanner. Overall I'm quite impressed, but there are a few significant annoyances that do impede the process of scanning.

Mechanically the unit is pleasingly solid, and the slide holder grips the slides firmly while being easy to load and unload. However, when sliding the holder into the scanner it is quite difficult to stop in the right place. There are dents in the side of the holder that engage with something spring loaded inside the scanner, but the action is not nearly positive enough. Quite often the prescan shows the slide to be incorrectly positioned and a nudge is needed, followed by a repeat prescan.



After the prescan, the edge of the image area has to be set. The SilverFast SEplus software supplied with the scanner has an automatic function to do this, but it quite often fails, particularly with under exposed slides or if the image contains strong straight lines near the edge. I do realise that finding the ragged edges of a scanned slide is a non-trivial image processing problem, especially as the prescan image is quite noisy, but I'm surprised at how often it fails. Even when it succeeds, it consistently treats the top and bottom edges of a slide differently, as in the example above.

What really annoys me though is that the software darkens the area outside the image frame, thus hiding any picture area that's missing. This makes manual adjustment a two stage process - drag and drop the boundary line beyond the slide edge (to undarken the image) then drag and drop it to the actual edge. I think the software should lighten the area outside the boundary to make any missed image more visible, not darken it to make it less visible. It's a diagnostic tool, not a slide show application.

After setting the image area, there are numerous controls to adjust the scan brightness, contrast, gamma, colour balance and so on. These are much more powerful than I need, but may be useful if I rescan a chosen few slides that merit extra care. These slides would probably also get the noise-reducing, time-consuming, multi-scan treatment as well. For now, I just use the auto-adjust function, occasionally choosing a different "image type" such as "evening" if it gives a better looking result.

One curiosity about the software is the choice of positive, negative, or Kodachrome film types. All the slides I've scanned so far have been Kodachrome or Ektachrome, and the Kodachrome setting has given a better colour balance than the positive setting. I haven't attempted to scan any negatives.

Having already catalogued my slides in a database application, I decided to reuse this data to label the slides. After some hours experimenting with different Python libraries to process EXIF and IPTC data I finished up with a script that seems to do the job. If you follow the link to flickr from one of the above pictures you'll see the description and tags that were automatically extracted by flickr from the image's EXIF and IPTC data.