Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.
Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today's technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.
Pro Photo Tools screen shot
Credit: Stephen Shankland, CNET Networks
"People are doing a lot more geotagging, but it's still somewhat cumbersome," said Josh Weisberg, Microsoft's director of digital imaging evangelism. "We want to make it mainstream."
Pro Photo Tools can be extended with new features: Microsoft is working on some and is considering whether to allow other companies also join in, Weisberg said.
"We've talked about making it extensible to third parties, but...It's a big question. I haven't decided yet whether we're going to do it," Weisberg said.
He also views Pro Photo Tools as a strong statement about what Microsoft can accomplish by building off its existing Windows infrastructure. "One hundred days ago, I wrote a memo," launching the project. "One hundred days later, we have a product. That's not typical Microsoft."
The software is an outgrowth of the Microsoft Photo Info software the company released in 2007 to help photographers label some images with metadata such as copyright notices, captions, and titles.
The software can process data from a handheld GPS unit that shows where a photographer roamed, adding the latitude and longitude data to photos depending on when they were taken.
The software lets photographers assign locations to photos by placing pushpins on an online map. It also adds rough geographic coordinates based just on a region name, such as "Boston." It can work with many of the proprietary "raw" image formats that higher-end digital cameras produce. And perhaps most significant, it uses Microsoft's Windows Live Local interface to add text fields such as region, city, and street to the photo.
To run the software on Windows XP, users must have installed the Windows Imaging Component, the image-handling engine built for Vista but also available for Windows XP. WIC is likely to become more mainstream soon on XP: it's built into Service Pack 3.
ZDNet.com.au's sister site CNET News.com also spoke to Adobe, which plans to fill in the DNG codec gap: "We'll be releasing a DNG codec shortly," said Adobe Lightroom leader Tom Hogarty.
Microsoft's Weisberg wouldn't detail much about what new modules are next for Pro Photo Tools beyond a few smaller features such as batch renaming to let photographers rename photos in bulk or a "painter" tool to let location tags or other metadata quickly be copied from one image and pasted to another.
But new features are en route. Microsoft plans another announcement at the Photokina show in September in Germany.
Microsoft wants Pro Photo Tools to be a work in progress — a frequently updated utility that evolves rapidly. "It's the evolving software model," Weisberg said.
Microsoft doesn't see Pro Photo Tools as competing either with the Expression Media product from iView Multimedia or with Microsoft's basic browsing and editing software, the Windows Photo Gallery package built into Vista or its more elaborate alternative, Windows Live Photo Gallery.
"Photo Gallery is focused on the consumer experience. We're looking at things more interesting to prosumers that would be complementary to Photo Gallery," Weisberg said. "We're also looking at Expression Media on the high end and walking a fine line between the two."
Nice read but WHEN will we see it folks.Have SP3 already.Interested in seeing,trying this new offering.