As of Monday, ExIf 35 had its first major release. With the release of “Milestone 1”, daily build number 20100405, I decided that the application was feature complete and stable. The entire build package contained the released executable for the Windows version of the application, as well as two different mobile platforms (PocketPC 2003, Windows Mobile 5). The application works quite well for what its designed for, which is nothing more than tagging scanned negatives or prints with proper information that was recorded when the image was taken. This comes with several major problems, the least of which is that every film photographer in the world except me runs a Mac. The worst of the problems is that the majority of film photographers are not in it for the art of it, or any nostalgic purpose, they are just lazy and un-adaptive, which means that they are avoiding the digital side of things for convenience and in general do not record exposure details. In my opinion, there is as much science as art in photography, especially in film (we can say for certain that there is chemistry), and as scientists of light and optics it is our responsibility to record details about each “experiment” we capture.

Now, off of my film soapbox, I am finding that the level of precision and care I take to tagging and keeping orderly my film information I wish to apply at least partially to my digital work. Of course the exif portion is already handled for me (thank the great maker for that), but I will be working on ExIfDSC to further manage this information. This will allow for manual adjustment of orientation, adding of tags, titles and descriptions. I plan to make the application function in two ways, first, just an image-by-image view that will let the user easily make adjustments without being distracted by 36 thumbnails on screen. Next there is to be a gallery view that will allow multiple image manipulation, mass rotations and such. ExIf35 works from its XML files, so will ExIfDSC, but it won’t be limited by them. ExIfDSC will support a majority of its processes by way of interacting directly with the image files. On the other hand, the gallery view will support forming gallery files, which will be images selected by the user that are important, have significance or are display-worthy. Sort of a more polished way of viewing images, eliminating much of the clutter that is associated with digital photography.

I am not abandoning ExIf35 and intend to actively support and promote it (as well as poke at it frequently for minor tweaks), but I need to change my focus to ExIfDSC so that all of the processes can be streamlined and my photographic world can be a happier place (but my happy place is a topic for another blog entry).