I've been looking forward to announcing this major release, as it holds a good number of new features and usability improvements.

 

The highlights for me are:

- Extended file format support

- Much improved ease of use around configuring and applying metadata mappings

- Fixing the page redirect after manually starting the extraction of metadata for images already in the library

 

In addition to the existing standard image formats like JPG, TIF or GIF etc., the FC.MetadataExtractor now leverages ALL WIC-compatible codecs that are installed on the SharePoint server. This potentially allows to extract metadata from various RAW file types (e.g. CR2 and NEF), as well as PSD or even DNG files.

Be aware that some of these codecs are freely available (e.g. many camera manufacturers provide the codec for their RAW format for free), while others cost a little bit of money.

 

 

First off, it is now possible to change the Field definition at any time, just like the choice of the list column the metadata should be written to. (I know, we should have done it this way a looong time ago)

 

Also, it is now possible to save the Metadata Mappings configured for one library as the "Standard Mappings" for the Site Collection, after which these mappings can then be easily added to other libraries as well.

 

Then, we've updated the default mappings and columns to include Fields which have become more popular over the last months. E.g. Latitude and Longitude are now default columns.

 

Several of the default columns of type Text are now Note fields in the library rather than Single Line Text fields, as we've seen more information being stored in them. Several of our customers found out that SharePoint is not "forgiving" if you try to store excessive amounts of text into a Text column. In such case SharePoint will actually update NONE of the fields of the item.

 

We've continued improving and completing the metadata access as much as possible. E.g. this time we've added better formatting of RATIONAL values and arrays of RATIONAL. I think by now we have a very solid metadata access implementation, even on older Operating Systems like Windows 2003R2, where the WIC functionality is still very limited.

 

Also please note that Microsoft has improved their documentation on the WIC (here and here), which might be helpful for you to determine  the right access string for the metadata Field.

 

 

We've had that request for quite some time, but the redirect to the right page view or paged view of a folder in the library was a bit complex to implement. I am very happy that we finally got this covered as I think it is a big nuisance for a user to manually return to a specific page view of the library.

 

The demo is already up on our website, so go get it and give it a test drive.

 

The Upgrade to version 2.3 is FREE for existing customers.

Enjoy!