Multi-lingual support

[Claude Diderich]

Are there any thoughts going into making PhotoMechanic multi-lingual, allowing to read/edit IPTCS data, like captions, in more than one language per photo, storing the data using the xml:lang tag?

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Hi Claude,

Is there other software that could read the multiple blocks of metadata and handle which language to display? It seems like every single dialog box would have to be redesigned and would potentially break compatibility with a lot of other software.  Speaking just for myself and not Kirk, but honestly this seems very unlikely.

Mick

[Claude Diderich]

Hi,
Some comments:

1: The "multi-lingual support" was more a question, than a feature request, as I understand there is little to no interest for multi-lingual captioning (except maybe in my home-country Switzerland, or Belgium). I don't know of any non-proprietary software that supports multiple concurrent languages.

2: I had the idea for multi-lingual support because I have developed a web photo database that translates captioning information using machine learning into the language of the system user, for example translating and displaying an English caption automatically into German, when the user has set his/her preferred language to German. If the user downloads a photo, I replace the caption information (typically written in English) with the translated one. This works fine, but has two drawbacks: a) I end up with multiple versions of each image, one per language, and b) the end-user only sees the translation, but not the original language.

3: The XMP specification includes multi-lingual support (Ch.2 and Ch.3, Language Alternatives) , but is not very clear (? does it only apply to rdf:Alt elements, which would be insufficient, as other blocks, like keywords, also contain local data).

4: I have create an example of an image of multi-lingual caption stored in the XMP data using my understanding to the XMP specification.

5: I can read the modified file using PhotoMechanic and Photoshop, the two applications I use.
   5.1: PhotoMechanic discards non x-default language information in rdf:Alt blocks when displaying the data, and ignores the xml:lang tag in other blocks, e.g., in rdf:Bag. When saving caption data, all non x-default data in rdf:Alt blocks and all other xml:lang references are discarded. This is unfortunate :-(
  5.5: Photoshop discards non x-default language information in rdf:Alt blocks when displaying the data, and ignores the xml:lang tag in other blocks, e.g., in rdf:Bag. Photoshop fails to correctly save the XMP data altogether.

6: From an implementation point of view, I would be less pessimistic. I believe to implement multi-lingual support, it could be sufficient to have on the Metadata (IPTC) Info and Metadata (IPTC) Template pages a drop-down box that allows the user to select the language in which to display/edit the data.

7: Conclusion: As long as major image processing software don't support (at least passively, i.e., not discarding multi-lingual information) multiple concurrent languages, I don't see any use to follow-up on my idea, especially as only having one software supporting it (and the others "destroying" it, by removing the multi-lingual data when saving) would not add any value! :-(

Thanks anyway.
Claude

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Thank you for the background and additional information. You make some good points and I think you are right about the dropdowns on the UI. Not the most difficult thing in the world, though many of the dialogs are very full at the moment :-)  I appreciate that very much.  It perhaps may be possible to someday implement, so I think it is appropriate to keep this in the feature request area here so that others may see it and comment in the future.

Mick

[Claude Diderich]

By the way, you may find my implementation of the feature using php, at least for the caption/description field, in https://github.com/diderich/metadata.

[FlunkyFoto]

I am also looking for a feature as described by Claude. It would be very nice to see it implemented.

[FlunkyFoto]

Hello,
I still looking for the multilingual function in my workflow.
Fotostation seems to be able to do so:
https://learn.fotoware.com/On-Premises/Getting_started/Metadata_in_the_FotoWare_system/Adding_custom_metadata_fields/Enabling_multi-language_metadata_support