adding original file names of photographs into Exhibeo.

Exhibeo
1

I just wanted to ask softpress if they would build the add original file names of photographs into Exhibeo.

The feature would enable exhibeo to import the original file names of the photographs being used in the galleries.

In showcase the feature is under the edit menu - captions - use filename as caption.

It would also be good to add use metadata as caption to exhibeo [under the same menu in showcase].

At the moment you have to copy and paste the file name of each photograph into the photo appearing in the gallery.

If you have a gallery with 250 photographs that will take you a long time to do!

As many photographers are very busy this takes time away from other tasks.

This feature would be a great selling point to photographers who are either using exhibeo either within freeway or a stand alone product for blogs etc.

Also photographers who take many photographs and need to build galleries quickly to send to clients either in the corporate sector or editorial for clients to choose images,
the clients need the photo ref numbers on.

Wedding photographers for example [a massive market for exhibeo] need these ref numbers so the bride and groom can choose their photos for their wedding books.

This feature would make great business sense for softpress because it would become a great selling feature for the software.

Any feedback from other users would be welcome.

Would other users add their names to this post to get softpress to add this feature to Exhibeo.

Cheers

Pete

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2

Hello Pete,

Normally, I latch on to updates when they come out.
I am resisting Freeway 7 because of 2 things.

  1. I am happy with Freeway 6
  2. Softpress still has not perfected Exhibio yet after all this time and
    suggestions.

They have always said that they are to busy developing Freeway 7 and could
not pull away resources for Exhibio.

As much as I like Freeway 6 and Exhibio (I only use Thumblie) I wish they
would maintain those products.

Sincerely,
Jerry Jambazian

On 8/12/14, 11:37 AM, “Peter” email@hidden wrote:

I just wanted to ask softpress if they would build the add original file
names of photographs into Exhibeo.

The feature would enable exhibeo to import the original file names of the
photographs being used in the galleries.

In showcase the feature is under the edit menu - captions - use filename
as caption.

It would also be good to add use metadata as caption to exhibeo [under
the same menu in showcase].

At the moment you have to copy and paste the file name of each photograph
into the photo appearing in the gallery.

If you have a gallery with 250 photographs that will take you a long time
to do!

As many photographers are very busy this takes time away from other tasks.

This feature would be a great selling point to photographers who are
either using exhibeo either within freeway or a stand alone product for
blogs etc.

Also photographers who take many photographs and need to build galleries
quickly to send to clients either in the corporate sector or editorial
for clients to choose images,
the clients need the photo ref numbers on.

Wedding photographers for example [a massive market for exhibeo] need
these ref numbers so the bride and groom can choose their photos for
their wedding books.

This feature would make great business sense for softpress because it
would become a great selling feature for the software.

Any feedback from other users would be welcome.

Would other users add their names to this post to get softpress to add
this feature to Exhibeo.

Cheers

Pete

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3

The lack of metadata / filename / caption is the reason I have not bought Exhibeo … with one other proviso … that it doesn’t strip ICC colour profiles either.

Honestly, I don’t know what it is with web app developers, maybe it’s a throw back to days when 3k extra to download was significant, but stripping owner info and removing colour profiles from images (so they look awful on some systems) is just pointless and I wish they would stop doing it.

I’ll buy Exhibeo tomorrow if an update caters for this.

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4

The lack of metadata / filename / caption is the reason I have not bought
Exhibeo … with one other proviso … that it doesn’t strip ICC colour
profiles either.

Look, having been a frustrated Softpress customer longer than most people,
there’s nothing I enjoy more than a good cathartic rant. But the truth is,
Softpress might as well change their name to Stoneface when it comes to
what they plan to do, or when and how they plan to do it. If they talked at
all, they might counter your offer by suggesting that if you buy Exhibeo
today, they will start improving it tomorrow. Stale, mate.

Honestly, (honestly, I don’t get paid to defend them so don’t remind me how
unpleasant this already is for me) - honestly, Exhibeo is so inexpensive
for what it does - amazingly and simply. Demanding more just seems a bit
unfair.

Now, asking for more does seem just right - and we should be (and are)
asking for more. Exhibeo is still demonstrably a basic product, ripe for
value-adding (remind me to sarcastically thank you when it’s tripled in
price) so asking for feature improvements is all well and good. Expecting
an answer or even a hint from Stoneface, though, is simply wasted optimism.

The simplicity of the current incarnation of Exhibeo actually works to the
benefit of folk like me who are willing to add our own value to the work.
For example, have you tried adding the metadata back into the exported
image files? Surely there is a tool somewhere that can copy image metadata
from the original and then embed it back into the exported images? After
you get your slideshow just right and create a final export to use, I mean.

The same goes for ICC profiles as well - plenty of tools out there to add
those to an image file.

File names are a different story - but the good news is that the output
code from simple Exhibeo is easily hackable and I bet it’s possible to even
change the image file names AND the change them in the controlling script
as well. Struth.

I am assuming that by captions you mean alt or title tags - something I’ve
even asked for. Captions are pretty much taken care of by the app, and
themselves are mostly hackable in terms of position and styling. Semantic
and accessibility tags like alt and title can be manually added to the
Exhibeo/Freeway exported code - never the most ideal option for Freeway
workflows, but does work. Interestingly, Exhibeo also can export as
HTML/CSS/javascript - which can then be manually edited and brought into
FWP as Markup items. Again, not ideal (to most) but certainly under your
direct control.

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5

Hi Big Erns,

thanks for your input and hear what your saying…

I’m not a coding person so will have to look into it [or if anybody know how to hack the exhibeo output code to include file names i would be very grateful!]

I just think if they added a feature to include file names it would open the app up to a massive photography market and therefore make more money for softpress.

Cheers

Pete

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6

On 8 Oct 2014, 12:20 pm, The Big Erns wrote:

Look, having been a frustrated Softpress customer longer than most people,
there’s nothing I enjoy more than a good cathartic rant.

Ha!!

I understand the pricing Erns and the simplicity, but I certainly agree with Peter, that the act of stripping (or not retaining) all the metadata that is already in the image files is precluding an absolutely vast clientele of professional and amateur photographers from their market.

I have done the ‘workaround’ stuff and I know what’s involved and frankly it’s a nightmare. Admittedly, if you’re gallery is simply used to illustrate your website and it’s not something you’re going to be changing often, then it’s a PITA, but it’s only an occasional PITA, so it can be lived with. However, if you are a photographer, or any other kind of visual artist, then this is something you are going to be doing repeatedly and with many images and at this point, it becomes unmanageable.

What strikes me as surprising with Softpress and Exhibeo, is that peeking a little bit into an imaginary future, you could envisage a whole market for Freeway, being born out of users who are looking for an Online Gallery solution … but with a little extra. The little extra providing something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s. The Freeway / Exhibeo marriage is exactly this, except in a way that is reminiscent of Apple’s software, the wonderful solution lacks a couple of tiny details and it turns out … those tiny details are deal breakers. How dumb is that?

Honestly, if Exhibeo didn’t strip metadata and icc profiles, it could save me a ton of time when combined with Freeway, compared to what I do now and what I do now, costs quite a bit more (sorry about the price tripling!).

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7

By way of coincidence, I read this today :

“Deliberate removal of metadata that identifies the copyright owner may be unlawful.”

It is taken from this document :

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/305165/c-notice-201401.pdf


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8

Exhibeo already respects existing filenames on output so if you mean something else, let me know.

ICC profiles were respected in a previous version of Showcase but some users reported ridiculous output file sizes (thumbnails in the megabytes IIRC), so we took the decision to remove them. We could certainly look into providing a way to toggle them on or off in the output, along with the other metadata.

As long as you’re not cropping or editing your images in Exhibeo, the workaround to this is very straightforward. Once you’ve exported you can simply replace the images in the image folder with the originals that you imported into Exhibeo in the first place. You just need to make sure there were no name clashes before importing them as Exhibeo will have renamed all but one of the clashing files. If you’re exporting to Freeway you’ll need to open up the xbExport package file by Control-clicking it and deleting Show Package Contents and locating the “image” folder.

I appreciate the support, Ernie. We don’t talk about future plans and release dates mainly because we don’t want to make promises that we can’t deliver. I know it can be frustrating on the customer side, but with all the potential pitfalls on the development side we’ve learned that keeping quiet about things until we’re 100% certain we can deliver something is a much better approach for all involved.

Cheers,
Joe

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9

And Joe, I appreciate everything you do to improve these products we use
and often enjoy - even though much of what you’ve done remains behind
closed doors (where my elaborate spy network reports to me).

You know that I strongly disagree with you about how transparency affects
the company image - no one expects you to share trade secrets or expose the
company to liability, but no relationship benefits from such limited
communication. We are also stakeholders - partners I would say - but
without the benefit of real conversation. I know that I would rather be
offering carrots, but sometimes the stick is the only way to get your
attention.

Of course, I am free to speak for myself, which, I apparently often do.

Best wishes, always…

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10

Hi Joe,

thanks for your reply. I also appreciate what you guys do at softpress towers. Freeway is great software and I imagine the team working away day and night writing code to the early hours.

What I was requesting is the showcase feature under the edit menu - captions - use filename as caption.

This would save photographers a lot of time with large amounts of photographs.

I also strongly believe this would be a great selling point for the software as photographers who build their own sites and blogs would jump at an app that builds responsive galleries with photo id as standard and just a click away.

Cheers

Pete

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11

On 10 Oct 2014, 12:31 pm, Joe Billings wrote:

ICC profiles were respected in a previous version of Showcase but some users reported ridiculous output file sizes (thumbnails in the megabytes IIRC), so we took the decision to remove them. We could certainly look into providing a way to toggle them on or off in the output, along with the other metadata.

Cheers,
Joe

Joe,

I’m really pleased you’re considering addressing this. Honestly, it’s so important.

There are two issues. 1/ Data integrity, in the form of accurately represented colour. 2/ Protection of intellectual property.

Colour :

The history of it all goes back to dial up modems, when every byte counted. The legacy behaviour of stripping everything possible from every element of a website, to counter the snail-speed dial up connection are long over and these days a few K here or there make little difference.

The size of an icc profile doesn’t really change according to the size of an image. So the cost of adding one to a tiny thumbnail, or an icon and the cost of adding one to a Retina Display sized jpeg is pretty much identical.

Here is a grab of the difference with and without an icc-profile on a 2048x1371 jpeg (5 KB) :

717×479 125 KB

As for the cost in terms of size, for adding metadata, here is a similar comparison, with and without metadata (4KB) :

714×500 116 KB

Intellectual Property :

Protection of intellectual property has become a huge issue for artists of all sorts since the arrival of the internet. Anonymous work just makes it harder and harder to control copyright abuse and theft. The Orphan Works initiatives are making it even more of an issue and for photographers, who are experiencing a sea-change in their industry, the last thing they need is people willy nilly helping themselves to their work, with nary a thought for the author.

Stripping metadata makes work anonymous and as such, should be actively discouraged. As software developers you guys already know how hard it is to fight to protect your intellectual property and to be properly paid for the work you’ve done. Pirating of software is your worst nightmare. Well … for photographers and other artists, it’s a similar battle. Deliberately stripping metadata only makes the job harder for us.

“We could certainly look into providing a way to toggle them on or off in the output, along with the other metadata.”

Clearly this is the absolute best of both worlds. But you know, I would bet that most people posting stuff on the internet, don’t even realise that there are already icc profiles in their images. … Take a screen-grab in MacOSX and you’ll find that you’re monitor’s profile is embedded in the image. Surprise! :slight_smile: Sure, we don’t need exif data which contains lots of useless camera info (in fact I strip this myself), but a few K for IPTC copyright, ownership info etc. is a small price to pay, for an essential service.

Also … regarding the simplicity of building galleries, the most useful metadata in this respect are ‘filename’ and ‘caption’ (sometimes called ‘description’). Having these retained is a HUGE timesaver. You will see Caption and the data that typically, I personally include in my images, in this grab :

(This is just the Info Panel in MacOSX Preview.app)

982×369 67.8 KB

Hoping you can find some time to enable Exhibeo to retain this data …

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12

Personally I’d vote to give the user the option of what meta data to keep and what to strip out of the file. I agree that embedded data can be useful but there are times where keeping the data can be an issue - especially if the user is unaware that it is in there to start with. Take for example, earlier this week, I had a client send me some photos that she’s shot on her iPhone of children who attend her dance classes. Without her knowing these all contained exact GPS coordinates of the child’s school or home. Until I mentioned it she was happy to upload them and share them with the world.

At Microsoft we referred to this as ‘unintended disclosure of personal information’ and ended up creating this privacy policy document which, hopefully, makes users aware on their actions;
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/795566/test/About%20Privacy%20in%20Microsoft%20Expression%20Media.html
All the best,
Tim.

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13

Very good point Tim and one of the reasons I already strip all EXIF data from my images.

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14

Thanks all for the feedback. Our main aim with Exhibeo is simplicity so we’ll see what we can do with it without getting away from our goals.

Joe

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15

Hi Joe,
I appreciate that settings like this can add to the UI clutter but, for me at least, a plist setting for these would be fine.
Regards,
Tim.

On 10 Oct 2014, at 20:06, Joe Billings wrote:

Thanks all for the feedback. Our main aim with Exhibeo is simplicity so we’ll see what we can do with it without getting away from our goals.

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16

On 11 Oct 2014, 12:45 pm, Tim Plumb wrote:

Hi Joe,
I appreciate that settings like this can add to the UI clutter but, for me at least, a plist setting for these would be fine.
Regards,
Tim.

Me too.

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17

To the OP and others regarding using Exhibeo for professional photography needs -

I think you miss the entire point of Exhibeo as a program. Yes it can be useful for many things but the focus is more oriented towards website galleries/web design. And as Ernie pointed out - it’s slim feature set is reflective of it’s small cost.

Anyone who is serious about professional photography galleries where the client can pick their favorites and send them to the photographer, should look at something like Zenfolio - (contact me for a discount code if interested). I routinely upload proofs galleries of thousands of images for clients and would be hard pressed to find a simpler solution.

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18

How about an Exhibeo Pro version?

Features:
Auto titles from file names
Photos metadata
Copyright
Tags
More themes,
Google fonts

Any more for the wishlist?

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19

Sounds good.

Features: More choices of layout/position for buttons/thumbs. (Auto-Hide thumbs are good too)

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20

That would be great.

Also: More choice of caption layout positions, such as directly under the Thumblie images.

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