Part of the motivation to write my Simple Photo Tagger program was to make sure that when I put a caption on a picture, it will be embedded in the picture in all the various “locations” (I have no better word for it) that the various tools out there use.

And let me tell you, it’s a big mess! To illustrate, let me use the WIC query notation for metadata that Microsoft uses and list which program uses what locations to store “caption” (and “select” other) information:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Organizer
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Windows Live Photo Gallery 12.0.1347.718
/xmp/dc:title/x-default

Google Picasa 3.1.0 (build 70.71, 0)
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 1.0
Title
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

Headline
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
Caption
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Title
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

I actually used Simple Photo Tagger to discover these differences, since it will query most of the above locations and display any that have data “in them”. The ones that don’t have data, will not be shown.

So if you want to make sure that no matter which tool you use to work on your digital photos, they will pick up your caption properly, use Simple Photo Tagger. It will make sure to write your caption to as many locations as the various other tools out there seem to use.

Categories: Software, WPF
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You may have seen the CardSharkV program I’ve published here previously. So far it hasn’t met with much interest out there. Maybe this one will: Simple Photo Tagger.

I’ve been looking for a program that will help me work through commenting on thousands of my digital photos. I haven’t found anything that’s focused solely on this one task that I consider essential for adding value to my collection. So, like any developer not finding what he/she wants, I rolled my own.

I’m making the result available to you, in case you’re interested. It’s written in WPF 3.5 SP1, in case you’re curious about such details. I’m looking for testers and feedback, so for a while I’ll waive the nominal charge for a license key.

Categories: Software, WPF
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From a couple of people at touchsmartcommunity.com comes a report of the Weather tile always reverting back to "Cupertino" after closing and re-opening the HP TouchSmart software. Until a proper fix for this can be published this is a series of steps that can be taken to get the Weather tile settings to "stick" and not revert back:

1. Close down the HP TouchSmart software completely. You may have to go to Personalize – TouchSmart Settings first and uncheck the QuickLaunch option to ensure everything closes down completely. If the QuickLaunch option is checked, the Close button behaves more like a standby function in that it hides the HP TouchSmart UI but keeps things running in the background for faster re-opening.

2. Start Windows Explorer, for example by using the Win+E keyboard hotkey combination, or by using the Vista Start Menu to open the Documents folder.

3. Type %LocalAppData% into the address bar:

(4.) and then press Enter on the keyboard.

5. Now navigate into the Hewlett-Packard folder:

6. Now navigate into the Weather.exe_Url_* folder (the cryptic letters after the _Url_ part will be different on every system, on my system it looks like above):

7. If you have two folders as shown above (particular folder names are not that important), delete the one with the smaller version number. In the above example it would be the 1.0.3106.17497 folder. Alternatively you can rename it to start with anything but a digit.

From now on any setting changes you make in the Weather tile should be remembered properly.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software
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Looks like my hosting company decided to move my blog from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS, breaking the PHP CGI in the process. Thus, my blog was offline for around 20 hours or so (rough guess).

Support claimed I had a “custom” PHP install, which I think is not the case. Anyway, I had to copy the 64 bit PHP CGI binary from their system location to my blog location, update a pointer and now everything is good again.

Apologies all around for going “dark” for a while.

Categories: Personal, Software
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I had a very unpleasant experience today. My wife is trying to deal with pain in her arms and hands from too much typing by using Vista’s speech recognition feature along with Word 2007. She was writing a final paper for a college class and had just finished the last four of nine pages. That’s when she noticed an extra word in her paper, right at the end: “document”. It didn’t belong there, so she did what you’d do naturally and said “delete document”.

THAT’S WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED. Apparently the speech recognition software turned that phrase into a command and proceeded to empty the nine page paper of all content without hesitation. On top of that, the undo feature of Word seemed to not have noticed the command (or been bypassed somehow), so she couldn’t get the document back via undo either!

This all happened while I was in a meeting at work right before lunch. When I got back to my desk I had several panicked voice messages. Luckily, five pages from the day before could be salvaged because my wife had the presence of mind to close the document without saving, which let her recover all but the about four hours of work that had gone in before the disaster struck.

I went home over lunch to see if I could salvage any more. I decided that I needed support from Microsoft. Well, the call with Microsoft Product Support was less than pleasant (as support calls usually are) and didn’t get us the four pages back, either. Best I could tell nobody had ever reported such an issue before.

I’m surprised this glaring problem escaped all testing at Microsoft. One of the cardinal rules of software development was violated in this case: “Never, EVER, lose the user’s data.” I can’t believe there was no prompt to confirm if she really intended to delete everything in response to the phrase “delete document”. I can’t believe there was no undo possible.

I just can’t believe it. Yet, it’s true.

Categories: Microsoft, Personal, Software, Vista
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Check out the interview with some of the HP TouchSmart folks on .NET Rocks! It just went live earlier today.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=399

The parts for developers are mostly in the first 15 minutes. I have some PDF slides that might illustrate things for people who are just looking for a quick visual and not a whole lot of depth. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll post them here.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software development, Tech Toys
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