Custom Information

Zoner Photo Studio can save picture information in three standard formats for such information; one of them is XMP.

The specification for XMP can be found at e.g.http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/pdfs/xmp_specification.pdf.The XMP standard allows for the addition of custom information types, and Zoner Photo Studio supports this aspect of XMP. The information defined in Zoner Photo Studio is normally in the http://zoner.com/xmp/userdata/1.0/ namespace. Only text information is allowed. Four types of custom information are supported. Zoner Photo Studio does not enable full use of these types. This possibility is present only so that certain standard XMP data that Zoner Photo Studio does not display can be mapped to custom information.

These types are:

  • plain text (and lists—these actually only differ in the way they are visually presented)
  • date and time (this is stored in XMP as text with certain rules)
  • localized text (an XMP type that is used for e.g. storing copyright)
  • text sequence (an XMP type; author information, for example, is stored in this way—under XMP a photo can have multiple authors and these can be stored as multiple items

For a normal user, the only important types are plain text and, occasionally, date and time.

Configuration—this sets the placement of the configuration file. If you wish to share custom information with multiple users, it is essential for these users to also have the items selected in their own configuration files. You can achieve this either by copying the configuration or by placing it on a shared path. If the configuration is on a shared path, do not permit multiple users to edit it at once.

An item's Title is the name under which it is shown in your copy of Zoner Photo Studio. The type is governed by the rules mentioned above. This option shows the variants available for the "list" type.

Use the settings under Configure XMP settings to configure how information is stored in XMP. If this group of controls is not activated, the configuration is created automatically on the basis of the item name, and the program shows a warning whenever any conflict occurs.

Namespace identifies the group of data to which the selected item belongs. You can find a list of standard namespaces in the XMP specification, but you can also create your own namespaces.

The Prefix sets how the items in the corresponding namespace will be identified in the stored XMP file. It should be short and should contain neither spaces nor extended characters.

The Item control sets the name under which the item will be stored in XMP. Its name should be short and should contain neither spaces nor extended characters.

Here is how you would include a copyright field as Custom Information (even though, of course, the program already offers such a field):

Title: Copyright
Type: Localized text
Namespace: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
Prefix: dc
Item: rights