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Photoshop File Info Panel for MIDAS

Users of Adope Photoshop can use this technique for adding metadata to still images before upload to the MIDAS catalogue.

The MIDAS Photoshop File Info panel


Users of Adobe Photoshop will be aware of the "File Info" item in the "File" menu. This can be used to add descriptive data ("metadata") to an image currently open for editing. When the image is saved to disk, this metadata will be retained in all unaltered copies the image file. Photoshop editions from CS 2 onward use the XMP metadata specification, which can accommodate metadata vocabularies for various purposes, including user-defined data elements. The latter is what we use for images uploaded to the MIDAS catalogue.

Note: Earlier versions such as Photoshop 6 do not support support the XMP medatada specification and do not have customizable File Info panels.


Installing the MIDAS panel


First, download the MIDAS File Info panel.

Next, move the downloaded file, MIDASInfo.txt, to the folder where Photoshop looks for File Info panels. On computers running Windows, this is either

  •  \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels

or

  •  \Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Adobe\XMP\Custom File Info Panels

where folders "Program Files", "Common Files", and "Documents and Settings" can have names in your local language and <user> is your user name. Typically, first path is used if Photoshop is installed for all users on the machine, and the second path will be used if Photoshop is installed for a particular user only. If folder "File Info Panels" contains further folders such as "1.0", then open this folder and a further sub-folder names "Photoshop". There you sould see several files named "Camera1.txt", etc. Use this folder to add the MIDASInfo.txt file.

On computers running Mac OS X, the location is either

  • {Root Volume}/Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Custom File Info Panels

or

  • {Home Directory}/Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Custom File Info Panels

where {Root Volume} and {Home Directory} should be substituted with the corresponding folder names on your computer. If "Custom Info Panels" contains further folders, proceed as described above for Windows computers.


Using the MIDAS panel


Once the MIDASInfo.txt file has been properly installed, start Phoshop and open a JPEG file (or open a file in another format and save it as JPEG). Next, select the "File Info" item in the "File" menu (menu items will have different names in non-English versions of Photoshop) and look for the "MIDAS Imgage Info" entry in the panels list of the left.

Clicking on "MIDAS Image Info" will open a data entry form in the right hand side of the window. Enter the approriate information here and close the FileInfo window by clicking on "OK". The information you have entered will be written to the image file as soon as you save the image to disk.



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