The theme of this year's Microsoft Pro Photo Summit appears to be a big hurrah for New Media, with an aside to new technology. Yesterday Natalie Dybisz (aka Miss Aniela) recounted her trajectory from Flickr self-portraitist to hot Art Star. Today Lou Lesko urged us to embrace the pirate culture of the internet, and allow our work to be used far and wide with attribution as the new currency and branding as the goal (which strikes me as just another version of the “Will work for credit” economic model).
In a kind of negation of the internet attribution model, David Riecks from the Stock Artists Alliance gave a scary demo of how Flickr strips all metadata from your images. Here's how to check it out. Pick a photo on Flickr. Right click and go “Open image in New Window.” Copy the web address, and paste it into Jeffrey's Exif Viewer. What you'll see is a chart with various basic file info and image profile info, but absent any copyright and credit IPTC fields (another way is to open up the image in Photoshop and look at File Info.) For another take on the impact of this, read today's A Photo Editor.
The Expression Media team met with a group of interested photographers over lunch. It's been a little over a year since Microsoft bought Iview Media Pro, the popular media cataloging program and, by many accounts, they broke it. They have been working overtime since to recover their reputation and fix the product. Many of the original Iview team have made the transition to Redmond.
Expressions Media v.2 is just out. I've got a copy, and I'll review it soon. But, I have to say that the XM team has embraced an attitude of open communication with the photographic community. Any bug reports sent to [email protected] get seen by the entire team. They embrace open standards for xmp metadata; nothing will be proprietary. You can make round trips to and from applications and know that your data is retained. They really want to know what we want, and they want to make a product that doesn't impose a rigid workflow.
The catalogs in XM2 are still capped at 2gb. It takes me four catalogs to organize a year of shooting, and if I don't know which month I took a shot, I can't find it. This will get fixed, they assured us. But it requires a big rewrite of the program, which will happen in v.3 next year.
In general, this year's Summit was a subdued and buttoned down version from previous years. The attendee count was less than half from previous years, and less diverse. Last year the tech demos were from a variety of vendors and industry innovators. This year they were all gee-whiz demos from Microsoft Labs. There were no give-and-take panels and too many pretty slide shows. There was no Tim Grey throwing out door prizes to the audience (Robin loves the Zune I captured last year). I learned far less this year than at the prior summits. It feels like an event that the corporate suits have captured from the creatives.
Doug, I've been a software developer for 24 years and it never ceases to amaze me how frequently M$ messes up software that they purchase. They always seek to implement their Microsoft-knows-better strategy and change things that already work. Further, they seem to keep expanding, getting into things that they have no idea about, like photography.
Sure, it will be fixed, because a number of people are complaining. As you can tell, I'm not a fan of M$. No way!
Posted by: Paul | July 11, 2008 at 09:39 AM
I try and separate the individuals from the institution, and in this case, the iView team is really trying. They complained themselves about the annoyances of trying to get things done in the Microsoft way that made solutions harder. And yet within the company are really talented people with great integrity. Apple has many of the same problems of institutional arrogance--they are a Microsoft in the making.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | July 11, 2008 at 09:55 AM