I am working with Windows Vista (Release Candidate 2) and in Vista, you can rate pictures, add tags, titles etc directly from the Windows Vista Explorer. However, in contrast with XP who uses a number of XP.... tags, Vista uses apparently his own set of tags (reading some common tags, but writing also his own), for example as set via Vista and extracted using the excellent exiftool with the -a -G1 -H options (part of output, the value 'Vista ....' filled in by me through explorer):

I did not yet find anything on this in the (excellent) documentation, and seem not to be able to write/delete them eg using -XmpmetaRights=MyText. Did I miss something?

I am looking into the tags used by Vista and how it uses the standard tags, i.e. priority in reading them if multiple are filled in (like if the old XP style tags are used, or IPTC/EXIF tags), did someone already do this? I like to use those tags for image searching, but every tool seems to use its own set of tags, I'll like to write a tool to normalize them to the most commonly used ones.

I've managed to locate a sample of the Windows Vista XMP myself. The XMP they are writing is non-standard in a number of ways:

1) The enclosing element is 'xmp:xmpmeta', but it should be 'x:xmpmeta' according to the specification. This is the reason for all of the "Xmpmeta" prefixes on all the tag names, and the reason you can't write anything.

2) Vista has messed up the names and/or case of many tag ID's:

3) They use a number of tags not defined in the specification::

I will add a patch for the 1st problem, but the 2nd is a pain and I don't know the best way to handle this. I will also look into adding support for the new tags of number 3.

I hope they fix some of these problems before the official Vista release.

- Phil

After more investigating, it looks like 'ProgramMode' is not a new tag, but just an incorrect ID for an existing tag:

So I have seen no new tags introduced by Windows Vista. This is good, but it would be nice if they would fix the bugs with the tags they are writing.

- Phil

I've just released ExifTool 6.71 which addresses a number of these issues. Here is the breakdown:

- Added patch for Vista "xmp:xmpmeta" unconformity

- Added patch for Vista XMP tag ID case problems

- Added patch for Vista EXIF Unicode byte ordering bug

- Added support for new XMP-microsoft tags

- Added support for 2 new Vista EXIF "Ratings" tags

- Have not yet addressed incorrect Vista XMP tag ID's "ISOSpeed" and "ProgramMode"

That's about it. The Vista XMP implementation is really pretty much of a joke. They need to fire the programmers responsible. This is the worst formatted XMP I have ever seen, aside from the blatant bugs I have mentioned, here are a couple more "features" of the Vista XMP:

- A distinct lack of newlines in the XMP text make lines many hundreds of characters long, which effectively defeats one design goal of XMP -- to be human-readable.

- There is no padding before the "xpacket end" token as suggested by the XMP specification. While this doesn't bother me too much, the joke is that they have added padding after the xpacket token. In this location, the padding is nothing more than a waste of space because here it cannot be used as designed to provide growing room for the XMP data by an application that does not process the rest of the file.

Just thought it may be useful for someone down the road to document all this. In an ideal world someone might point out this thread in a bug report to Microsoft. I took a quick look, but couldn't find a place to submit this information myself.

- Phil

Thanks (already for version 6.72), works great!!.

I found some more tags I could change using the properties window in Vista explorer. I now filled in all fields which could be changed from the explorer (which seems rather random: for example it is possible to set the contrast using a Vista-supplied drop-down list, however brightness is listed but not changeable, same for other fields). Most ended up in XMP-microsoft or XMP-exif fields. I've send you a normal email with this updated image.

I also changed the rating from 3 to 4 stars; this shows as:

So I guess the XM_-microsoft is a rating on a scale of 0..100% ??

I'll try this weekend to find out in which order Vista reads a number of tags (i.e. like the order -UserComment=Comment1 and -XPComment=Comment2 are treated if filled in). Might be useful for some readers.

Kees Moerman.