2007/7/3, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh@gmail.com>:
On 7/3/07, Barcex <barcexwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
This issue has come up multiple times, but without much result. What
specific features does Commons need to have? A list of this might be
interesting, because their are very likely users who are willing to
implement those kind of things, either as an extension, javascript
hack or external service.
Bryan
Let me say that I'm not a photo professional, but I know well that on image banks metadata is the king. Our support for metadata right now is a hack of MediaWiki templates that are very difficult to edit, and are not searchable. Then, there are professional standards like IPTC to add rich metadata to pictures. Work on that standards is already done, is professional and we should take a look to them instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Tags (
a la flickr) are a mess as our categories are, it is very hard to keep them organized following the wiki model.
Of course, editing full IPTC can be difficult as is complex (having many fields to fill in). But a simple interface could have the most important fields to edit, and have an advanced editor for experienced users. This interface should allow the edition of IPTC registering changes an versions as we do with text (so you are able to compare each version of the metadata as you do now with text, that's the wiki concept).
Once we can provide images with rich metadata, a lot of tools can be developed to generate advanced searches.
That's my contribution to this brainstroming ;)
Barcex