Digital Light & Color

There seem to be three places where image info and metadata can be found: Image Properties, Window Info and File Comments. Parts of them are overlapping. The Window Info was great and compact and really easy to read, it disappeared from Window menu, but it can still be found in History (right click). The new Image Properties and especially explicit division of EXIF from IPTC comments is great. The File Comments window (right click in History) has some a combination of EXIF and IPTC? but it's not obvious which one is which. Would it be a fair statement that File Comments are now superseded by Image Properties?

There is now a single, consolidated properties display. The same display is available from the browser, history, the Windows menu and the image window. It shows EXIF information, generally recorded by the camera at time of exposure, color profile information, and Windows file dates, sizes, folder location information and an associated workflow file. The properties display also has a User Comments button. This displays a selection of editable EXIF and IPTC fields.

Kiril

I think that the new universal Image Properties screen is more powerful than the Windows Info, but I'm still missing the compactness of Windows Info and its formatting. Here are my observations:

• - there is no colour profile info
• - there are three different dates (they may be useful, but at a glance I kind of need a single one most of the time - perhaps displaying EXIF and hiding the other two as 'extended info' or something similar would make the display less busy).
• - I would probably do the same with Meter/Exp Prog. and MFG. - relegate them to second layer or some extra group at the bottom. For exif essentials I would like to now +/- exposure compensation; maybe compress lens info into one line (lens type, then focal length if it is zoom).
• - The Created/Original Exposure date doesn't show time on my machine (shows date and :: instead of the time for some CR2 files, but for some others it works fine - which EXIF field does it read, perhaps I could check what's missing in my files).
• - If the Folder name is long, it is truncated at the window border. The window is not resizable to see it.
• - Maybe using bold (or colour too) and indents (like in Windows info), with some visual grouping would make the information easier and faster to find. Meybe it's the current double line formatting too that makes it look busy to my eye?

It's probably me, but it takes me fraction of a second to find what I'm looking for in Windows Info, and much longer in Image Properties

Also, User's Comments (right click in Browser) are read only (except for the month, which doesn't look read only), while comments are editable when the image is opened. Is it how it should work?

And there is one suggestion, I'm not sure if doable, that I would find v. useful: being able to open the Image Properties window and than browse through Browser thumbnails and show the properties in the same window as the images are browsed through. Or perhaps Next/Previous button in the Properties could do similar thing.

On similar note: the Add Keywords (right click in Browse) seem to accessing and editing the same EXIF fileds as are available in Image Properties/User Comment. Maybe that could be consolidated as well?

The Add Keywords don't seem to work with RAW files (I imagine by design, but I would find it useful if RAW EXIF could be edited).

Also, when I added text in Add Keywords to all three fields (in Add mode), and then previewed the results in Properties/User Comments, strange things resulted.