Microsoft & Flickr

It’s very nice to see that with the latest version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta, I can now publish photos directly into Flickr. Excellent.

 

 

 

Update 25 October 2007: Ah well, I spoke too soon. The Upload to Flickr facility in Windows Live Photo Gallery has a bug. The IPTC/XMP Description metadata field in image files is not preserved during the upload process. Instead, the contents get overwritten by the content of the Title metadata field.

 

Update 26 October 2007: I sent an email to the Microsoft Photography Blog, and I’ve had a reply back. It turns out that they do preserve the image metadata, but for some reason they map the XMP Title field to the Flickr Description.

 

Why on earth do they do that? It seems to me to be much more logical to map the XMP Dublin Core Description field into the Flickr Description field… That’s what Flickr’s own uploading tool, Flickr Uploadr does, after all. With WLPG, I end up with files on Flickr where the Flickr Description doesn’t actually correspond with the image metadata shown under Flickr’s "more properties". It makes no sense to me.

 

So now I have the situation where Microsoft’s own Photo Info plug-in correctly displays the Description field; all my other image tools correctly display XMP/IPTC information, but WLPG corrupts the Description field on Flickr because it marches to a different tune. I’ll continue to stick with Flickr Uploadr, thanks very much.

 

Update 27 October 2007: I’ve had a further email reply from a member of Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery team. He agrees with me that the mapping of the Title field into the Flickr Description field is a bug, and he has logged it as such. Hopefully, it will be corrected in a future version of WLPG.

 

Update 17 September 2008: The latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery was released as a beta today, and wouldn’t you know it – that bug is still there… Here’s a photo uploaded to Flickr with the Flickr Uploadr tool. See how the description field says what it is supposed to say? And here’s the same photo uploaded with Windows Live Photo Gallery. See how the description field has been overwritten by the file title field? Gah…

 

Update 21 September 2008: I’ve described a further bug in Windows Live Photo Gallery that is a showstopper as far as I am concerned.

 

Update 17 December 2008: The version of WLPG released yesterday (build 14.0.8051.1204) has fixed the mapping bug. Hooray.