Switched Keys

I'm still musing over all of my Launch notes but since I only have a few minutes I thought I would start with a side note. Among the handful of neat/new things about Vista one of the best ideas presented in the Vista launch is the ability to easily add or change the meta data of certain files. Things like author keywords and the like can be changed on the main screen in Vista.

I use the term idea for a reason; there is a catch. If you use this feature on some of your photographs particularly Nikon NEF files Vista can destroy important camera meta data on those camera raw files. Stephen Shankland writes about it on a cnet site and Microsoft explains it in its knowledge base

as never mentioned in the presentation. Nor was it mentioned that apparently Microsoft isn't really going to fix this problem. They are asking the camera manufacturers to fix it. It appears that the fault lies with the proprietary camera raw formats and Microsoft isn't going to take these non-standard formats into consideration when it opens these files.

Reminds me of my frustration with some of Microsoft's non-standard extensions to html a few years ago.