The Ideals behind Ideal Products
Besides adhering to the guiding principles proposed in the Metadata Manifesto, products aiming to gain significant market share in an increasingly metadata-hungry market should embody the following design ideals.
Products must allow metadata to be embedded as early as possible in the image creation process.
This could include:
- the ability to store a metadata template-or at least the image creator's name-in the internal memory of digital cameras and other image generating devices so that authorship information is automatically written to the metadata section of every newly created image..
- the ability to store authorship information on a protected sector of storage devices such as memory cards, and
- the ability to have image processing utilities automatically transfer this information (and even embed the information in the image) at the time images are copied to another device.
Products must allow metadata to be ubiquitous and persistent.
- Metadata must be preserved by default in all imaging applications.
- User interfaces must be clearly designed to prevent users from inadvertently removing metadata.
- Any mechanisms for removing metadata must allow image users to clearly understand what they are about to do.
- Metadata removal mechanisms must allow for selective removal of individual fields, as opposed to wholesale removal of all data.
- Any process for compression of images for low-bandwidth use should by default preserve at least a reduced set of metadata, and must at a minimum preserve the image ownership information.
Products should facilitate usage rights tracking.
Including:
- the ability to automatically assign a persistent, unique identifier to each image so image users can identify and track its origin more easily
- the ability to store passwords for selective levels of use permissions.
- the ability to password-protect authorship-related metadata to prevent inadvertent changes, as well as reduce the incidence of fraudulent changes.
Products must facilitate metadata automation.
Ideal products should:
- allow recorded actions or macros for metadata manipulation, including support for conditional statements.
- allow automated access to metadata elements through a cross-platform scripting language. There should be agreement on a common API and allow scripts to call the application's own metadata parser.
- allow scripts to read any and all metadata elements meant for public consumption. Restrictions, if any, should be honored so that private metadata is not read.
- allow scripts to write to any metadata elements for which writing is applicable or allowed.
