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Windows Photo Gallery has great metadata support. It supports hierarchical tagging, makes it easy to rename and caption photos, and even allows for adjusting the date and time that a photo was taken. For all this, it rocks, especially if all you have are JPEG images.

But as someone with a lot of PNG and GIF images, it’s pretty depressing to see that Photo Gallery doesn’t support embedding tags or other similar metadata for those formats. It’s been a while since the XMP specification came out, which I might add is supported by Photo Gallery and the Windows Imaging Component (which drives Photo Gallery), and has a scheme for embedding metadata in such images since at least 2005.

It’s a real pain when you move your images to another computer or device, as Photo Gallery stores metadata for PNGs and GIFs in its own database. If I’m not mistaken, even sharing such images with other users on the same computer will result in those users not being able to see the tags and caption you’ve set, because the data just isn’t stored in the file itself.

There’s a new version of Live Photo Gallery (an enhanced version of Windows Photo Gallery) on the way. I hope that with it, comes updates to the PNG and GIF codecs for WIC that adds the XMP support I and others so crave. I’d also love to see support in it for uploading images to services other than just Flickr and Windows Live Spaces. Would it really be so hard on Microsoft to provide a plugin framework for photo services?

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