Standards – a quick rant

When it comes to standards and companies not following them, I could have a good old rant about many top companies, computer and software companies being the worse.

The other day a photographer friend of mine was demonstrating his new photo editing software.

While key wording and adding other important metadata, we wondered where it was writing this data.

As I suspected, it was using a sidecar file to accompany the jpg’s and raw’s.

What really rilled me was instead of using an xmp sidecar file (an open standard developed by Adobe) which many other software programs can read, not just Adobe Lightroom or Camera Raw, it uses it’s own proprietary format.

Why!  Lock in, thats why, but the worry is, will the companies own future software support their own proprietary formats, past history suggests not.

From Wikipedia:
XMP sidecar files. For file formats that have no internal support for XMP data, the data is stored in separate .xmp files with the same base file name. Many photo cataloging applications have support for this file format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform

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