Microsoft recently released
Pro Photo Tools for editing image metadata. Initial reports looked promising, so I decided to give it a try. Here are my initial impressions...
Pro Photo Tools requires
.NET Framework v3.0, which many people won't likely have installed already. After installing the .NET Framework you must reboot, then you can install Pro Photo Tools. Both of these installs require the annoying Microsoft genuine software validation - uggg.
After installing, I ran Pro Photo Tools and attempted to open one of my raw DNG files. Oops...
The file extension is not supported as an image file format.
Perhaps a codec should be installed.Since I've been using Adobe Lightroom for my raw image editing, I've switched to using DNG raw format. Next I tried opening a .cr2 file from my Canon 30D. Same error. That's kind of a bummer! I imagine most
"pros" and a good number of advanced amateurs will want to work with raw image formats, and these are not supported "out of the box." After a quick Google search, I found this
FAQ Page indicating that codecs must be downloaded and installed from the manufacturer's websites in order to support raw image formats. Well, OK. I was able to navigate to the Canon website to download and install the
CR2 Codec (which required yet another reboot). It appears that Adobe has not released a codec for the DNG format - disappointing. But perhaps a little more research will turn up a solution?
Finally, after 3 program installations and 2 reboots, I was able to open an image into Pro Photo Tools. And with that behind me, I was able to start using some of the features...
- Images opened in the tool fairly quickly, but you can't determine the subject of the photos from the thumbnails created. They just look like digital artifacts. This would be a real problem if geotagging manually - you'd need to be able to identify the subject of the photo (using the thumbnail), in order to place it geographically.
- Previously, I downloaded my GPS tracklog from my Garmin ETrex Vista Cx into Garmin Mapsource. From there I saved a .gpx tracklog file. I was able to easily load this into Pro Photo Tools.
- I selected all my images and clicked on the Place Images button. This quickly geocoded my images and placed them on the nice, smooth Virtual Earth interface.
- You then have the option of adjusting the image's position. This is not very intuitive, but you can adjust the images according to the time on the tracklog. This is better suited for geocoding one image at a time. When you are finished tweaking (I just tried a few adjustments), you need to click the Done button. Then in the GPS Data section, you will see the selected images now have corresponding geo information.
- Then I clicked the Get location text button. I can't imagine this feature will produce anything worthwhile for my wilderness images, but I'm looking forward to using it for my travel photography. Again, this worked very quickly with a selection of 10 images.
- I selected File - Save All Images with New Data to save my work. Normally, with my standard digital workflow, I'd proceed from here to Lightroom and start processing/finishing my images. But...
- I played around a bit editing other metadata and didn't run into any problems. Some of these editing features could be quite useful.
Conclusions after a relatively shallow first use? After jumping through the hoops of the program and codec installation, the tool was fairly intuitive, fast, and easy to use. The lack of DNG support is a big drawback, for me (I'll do a bit of research to see if this can be resolved). And the unusable generated thumbnails should be fixed. But the features of this tool
DO look promising. And I look forward to subsequent updates/releases.
