"In extracting these buried fields and denormalising them into my post files I was able to think—as a purist—about how posts should be represented online. Especially for my circumstances. I have opinions, y'see." Timezones, pagination, and flow. Good stuff.

On machine tags, places, uploaders, concordance, and a todo list from those beyond the veil. So many lovely turns of phrase, so many things to play with.

'The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (PDF), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.'

Phil Gyford follows up on my automated copying of machine tags from digital photo EXIF by suggesting some versions for photographs for film.

Aaron on machine tags, noticings, fake subway APIs, Flickr, and stuff. Well worth a read (and as Tom Armitage says, with a great flow between sections).

Gizmodo on Photosketch. "Take any rough sketch, with the shape of each element labeled with its name, find images corresponding to each drawn element, judge which are a better match to the shapes, and then seamlessly merge it all into one single image." Just watch the video.

"Snow Leopard has broken «Creator code» file associations." Oh. Thanks. Hey, Mac OS X? I was *using* those. Sigh. (How come Siracusa missed that bit?)

"The Geolocation API will give us the ability to attach geographic metadata to tweets to provide additional context with your update. Along with the option to tag updates, we will be able to search for nearby tweets and view the geo metadata in user timelines." Hurrah. Opt-in, though.

"There is also the question of when and why a tag evolves in to being a first class data type and whether that’s actually reflected in how people use tags. Dates are one example, and geotags another. Each are uniquely indexed in the Flickr database and, still, people continue to add both as tags on their photos. The short answer, of course, is that it’s usually just easier to type 2008 or 2009 than to try and remember a specialized syntax for doing searches."

"iphotoexport allows you to export and synchronize your iPhoto library to a folder tree. It preserves both the original and modified image, your event and album organization, and applies your iPhoto titles, descriptions, keywords, and face tags to the IPTC/EXIF metadata of your images." I mentioned this on #2lmc and Tom immediately started enthusiastically playing with it; I should do the same.

Commentary on how my iPhoto/Flickr sync experiences are panning out after a month or so. There are some significant niggles, but there's also a glimmer of hope for back-populating previously uploaded Flickr photos into an iPhoto set.

Importing CR2s doesn't generate location metadata, so this chap used AppleEvents via Ruby to persist notes after deleting then reinstalling his photos. Sadly, there's no information here about new AppleScript dictionary methods. I'll have to examine that myself, I suppose.

$29 utility for Mac OS X for easily setting tags on files, photos and the like. Uses Spotlight. Might be nicer than the iPhoto interface (did it get any better in the new version?)

"Astrotags are a new way to label your photos of space – they describe what your photo is of, and where in space that is. With your help, we hope that astrotags will let us build a beautiful montage of your astronomy photos." Push a new one on the todo stack.

An interesting, somewhat long, survey into tagging, and how much it contributes over titles and descriptions. "How come the same person who tags his photo {Milan, Italy} is able to title it Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II?" The answer to this, I suspect, is that uploaders encourage batch tags but not batch titling. Also, as I noticed in where? what? when?, top tags for places tend to be geographic, but not terribly specific. I'd love to see a well-thought-out riposte, mind.

Could be a nice thing to use, but it doesn't seem to work with GreaseKit (which is somewhat unfair, given that GK is very slow).

"This document describes how best to use existing standards such as Exif, IPTC, and XMP to address the key organizational metadata questions that most consumers have." Does distinguish location-shown and location-taken, but shies away from trying to fix the timezone problem. Ah well. Spec is a PDF, sigh.

A nice little AppleScript folder action which calls xattr to remove that annoying "You've downloaded this, is it safe?" dialog. Trades security for convenience, of course, but if you want it, here it is. (I do.)

The most amazing thing to me about this post isn't the problem it describes, since I've never been a fan of the blosxom model. It's the fact people are still using file-based blogging systems at all. Mind you, they probably are all Unix geeks.

That annoying "this is downloaded from the Internet" dialog? Here's how to get rid of it.

Where Flickr Export stores the Flickr ID. If I ever get back to working on my Flickr/local photo reconciliation code, I should store the ID this way.

Sven-S. Porst's writeup of the latest iTunes update (before ringtones were released). As usual, a good roundup of what's new, and where Apple are being odd. I'm also wondering about the interaction of song and album ratings.

Aaron Straup Cope's talk at Hackday London

Tom Gidden does some of the things I want to do. I need to have a look at this code.

This post didn't really seem worth the time to read it, but then I noticed the comments about the fact that the buyer tags from iTunes Plus tracks are stripped by the app.

I was thinking of writing up the sort ordering options introduced in iTunes 7.1, but this seems to be a fairly useful description anyway. I was wondering if the sort data was in tags or the library; looks like the latter. Sigh. No metadata silos!

Noting the new tag limits.

Some notes: you can restore some (but not all) metadata by manually importing the XML file (but it's not automatic); as ssp says, metadata is not all; and ID3 metadata shouldn't have been lost (so his "tweaks to albums" should be there).

Using XML/RDF to combine Drowned In Sound and Openguides data. I think.

Dan Hill and commenters on the changes in cover art in iTunes 7. I'm a bit surprised that it took CoverFlow for people to start adding music. Noted a few AppleScripts.

On video taggers (for iTunes/MPEG4)

I wish people wouldn't conflate the iPod with ID3- should Apple rewrite metadata standards? I expect there are people out there who wish that people wouldn't do the same with "MP3 player", too, for different reasons.

I saw this then mislaid it, so it's going in here. Not that I'm likely to use it until/unless it goes core. Shame really.

last.fm and tags. Hmm. I kept meaning to put taglike data into my genre tags, but the collection is too large

iPod photo can now group by compilation. Handy, but presumably unlikely to make it back to older machines.