I think ID3v2 covered well its purpose. It allowed arbitrary meta-data (I think) and provided a standard for embedding even a thumbnail. I think I could have been adopted by formats other than MP3.
I too do want to add tags or other text inside my pictures, or bookmark or additional stuff inside (and outside but attached to) my pdfs. ID3v2 would be so nice.
You can attach sidecar files to your images. XMP is such a standard for storing additional, arbitary (meta)data with your image file. Many photo applications are writing their own XMP files for storing additional data.
Darktable uses it to store editing history, for example, to enable non-destructive editing of the images.
Sidecar files are such a confused approach to metadata storage. If I wanted file metadata to be portable, I'd put it in the individual files, and if I wanted it to not be portable, I'd put it in a local database (like Lightoom's .lrcat). Sidecars are somewhere im between. They are easy to miss and hard to ignore.
In my experience trying to get photographers to use Darktable, the xmp files are their main complaint. Luckily you can disable them now, but it's still a strange and jarring default.
All that being said, I definitely appreciate the elegance of using sidecars from a software point of view. They are a decent and sometimes necessary compromise. If I was a developer given such a task, I'd probably suggest the same approach. But as a user...no thanks!
> In my experience trying to get photographers to use Darktable, the xmp files are their main complaint.
I remember Adobe Bridge would do this as well. I only used Bridge for a short while during the Creative Suite 2 era, so I don’t know if Bridge does this still or not.
The first version of Bridge was released earlier that same year [1], as part of Creative Suite 2, so the discussion in the above thread is about that same version of Bridge for sure. The next version of Bridge came a couple of years later, in 2007 as part of CS3. I also remember that prior to the release of Bridge 1.0 as part of CS2, there was a public beta version of Bridge that I tested, which was pretty much the same as the eventual version that was released as part of CS2.
The idea of having a metadata resource attached in a standard way to every file is certainly tempting. Apple's Resource Fork is an example of it working well right until the point you need to copy said file over to a system that has no knowledge of it.
ID3 is not formally tied to any file format. It can exist without a media file or with any other file. It was conceived of for MP3 files but nothing should be stopping you ;)
