Folks: Every time Microsoft comes out with a new operating system I get excited to see what kind of features it has for managing a photo library. I don’t like the idea of using third-party photo library management and database tools because photo collections should last for at least one human working lifetime (90 years, assuming a photographer starts at age 10?) and software other than operating systems tends not to last very long.
Windows Vista was originally supposed to include a relational database management system behind the file system, which would have enabled the storage of captions and powerful querying for specific photos. I was disappointed when the product shipped. The file system was plain old NTFS (admittedly much more reliable than the standard Unix file system, but no different than on Windows XP). There was no support for camera RAW. Looking at a folder of JPEG-format photos in Explorer, the operating system would show thumbnails and other information; if the consumer selected RAW, on the other hand, he or she got a completely different and inferior experience on the computer. No thumbnails or other information about the photos were visible from the operating system. One had to install and use an application program such as Google Picasa in order to view camera RAWs.
I visited a friend last night who was brave enough to install Windows 7 on one of his old PCs. He is quite happy with the product, rating it much better than Vista. However, when I asked him to show me a folder including a mix of Nikon RAW files and JPEGs, the .NEF files were displayed without a thumbnail preview. Was his installation complete? Is there any hope for camera RAW in Windows 7?
[If the answer is “you need to install some other application program”, why then would I want to pay for Windows 7? Presumably the Google Chrome OS (free) will run my favorite browser (Chrome) and a good tool for managing RAW files, Picasa (free). Who is the target market for Windows 7? Just big companies that want to run Office, Exchange, and Microsoft-specific networking and collaboration tools?]
It appears that they can be viewed with Windows Photo Viewer, oh but only if you have the right RAW codec installed. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-SG/windows7/how-do-I-view-RAW-pictures
Ultimately, it doesn’t look like they can be previewed in Explorer.
OS X has no problems viewing RAW in the Finder, and Apple preloads the various RAW codecs for me! When I hit spacebar on a RAW file, the thumbnail expands to fill my screen with a high resolution preview.
It pays to pay the “Apple Tax”.
Uh oh, I fear that this thread is going to degenerate into another “Macintosh is so much better” war 🙂
Seriously, though, I got spammed today by Apple trying to sell me a 27″ all-in-one desktop for $1700. That didn’t seem like a bad deal. You would think that any company that makes a monitor would offer to throw in a PC for $200 extra, said PC occupying the back of the monitor. But in fact to have a 27″ screen on a Windows machine I think requires a separate box for the CPU and some care taken by the consumer as to which video card and cable to buy.
So let me forestall the “Apple is better” comments with this one saying that at least for people who value screen space and decluttering the house (e.g., me), Apple appears to have the upper hand right now.
For the rest of the comments, let’s hear from people who are managing camera RAW files on Windows 7.
I installed the RAW plugin from Nikon and now Explorer treats NEF files just like it treats a JPEG. Windows Photo Viewer won’t let me rotate the images, for what that is worth.
On the other hand, Windows Photo Viewer still doesn’t bother asking my photographs if it should display them in portrait or landscape mode. You win some, you lose some.
Philip, your friend can download the free Windows Live Photo Gallery (by Microsoft, a nice addition to Windows 7) or the Nikon codecs directly. Please let me know if you need any links
I can’t imagine what logic you’re using to decide that an OS without support for the application-level features you want is better than an application with the features you want. You may have to wait one working lifetime to get that.
The “I don’t want to lose my data when support disappears” logic is the same that some use to encourage DNG adoption (DNG is Adobe’s open raw format). It doesn’t persuade me because (for example) if Nikon and Adobe and Apple and Microsoft and every other company making software that allows me to work with my Nikon raw files were to evaporate today, I could still use the solutions I have now, tomorrow. Those solutions include migrating to different formats, some of which may still continue to exist the day after tomorrow. The chances that one of those formats I can now convert to (e.g. DNG) will exist in the future is at least as high as the proposed current “solution” (DNG) will exist.
By your same logic, you feel that every application should be part of the OS? Every game one might want to play? Every DB or spreadsheet or document format or design tool? I just don’t get it. Maybe I misunderstand your post.
Photo-workflow apps like Lightroom or Aperture are infinitely better than what any OS currently does, or (in my opinion) should do. They are designed from top to bottom, start to finish, to allow one to process many gigabytes of photos and to organize them for the short and long term in powerful and intuitive ways. Operating systems may well have tools for doing the same thing with generic “files”, but it seems silly to build deep and extensive domain knowledge (for how many thousands of domains?) into an OS.
And finally, while it’s true that Nikon’s NEF format is an image format, it is not generic in that it alone is not sufficient to create a final image. To create a final image from a NEF file (or from any non-DNG raw file), you need the raw file plus camera-specific sensor information, so that you know how to convert the sensor-specific color data to hardware-neutral color data (e.g. sRGB). No OS or application exists now that can properly display images from the next models that Nikon and Canon release; once they are released, those applications wishing to support images from them must be updated. (That’s the one benefit to DNG that I see: it includes within each file the sensor-specific data required for decoding, so cameras that generate DNG naively, such as Leicas, are already supported by any application that can handle DNGs.)
Jeffrey: It is true that a lean operating system would allow the browsing of filenames alone. And a pure operating system would not include a file system at all. But present PC operating systems are neither lean nor pure. The file system is bundled in with the OS. The file system browser provides significant additional support for some popular file types, including photos. As long as there is support for crummy 8-bit-per-channel JPEGs I would like there to be support for 12- or 16-bit-per-channel RAW files. It is true that JPEG is a standard whereas RAW is not. However, if the thousands of programmers who work on PC operating systems cannot support these file types, then what am I paying them for?
You say that photos are just one of “thousands of domains” and there is no reason to build in file system browser support when consumers could pay for a separate application in each domain. Right now here are the things that an human being can author: text, still image, audio recording, video recording, spreadsheet, stupefying PowerPoint-style presentation, engineering or architectural drawing, 3D model, computer program. Thanks to our public school system that renders increasing numbers of people innumerate and jobless, I would say that it is the first four that are most important for American consumers and photos are one of the four.
If you’re saying that a pure OS wouldn’t sully itself with special support for photos or video and we should all use Unix circa 1975, let me point out that Unix circa 1975 had significant built-in support for text within files. You could use Unix operating system commands to search for text within a file, but not for a sound, pattern, or sequence within an audio clip, photo, or video clip. What makes text so much more important than other kinds of data?
RAW codecs for Windows 7 and Windows Vista provide thumbnail, metadata, and preview support throughout windows.
http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/codecs.aspx
I’m suggesting that broad and general incidental support (“view this pdf”, “view this photo”) is reasonable, but deep domain-specific application-level support is unreasonable to expect. I think it’s unreasonable to expect OS-level support for grammar-checking documents (what language? What grammar style? what document format?), for example.
On the other hand, of the OS vendor wants to bundle such applications with the OS, I’m all for it. I guess to the average consumer there’s little difference, but frankly, the OS vendor you mentioned has shown an increasing inability to get the OS part right, so the consumer might be excused for asking them to get the basics working before adding the frills.
NEF files are a form of the standard TIFF format, and contain an embedded JPG image (two of them, actually: a full-sized version and a thumbnail version) in the same way that JPGs can contain embedded thumbnails, so it’s fairly pathetic that the OS you mentioned can’t even pull those. But since users of other OSs generally do enjoy the ability to view them, I didn’t want to mention this thumbnail bit at first, for fear of being labeled religious about some other OS.
As for “what am I paying them for?”, my goodness, that’s a question that a lot of people are asking. My first Microsoft OS was DOS 1.0, which IIRC never crashed. My most recent was Win XP. I certainly got a lot more value for the latter, but I do wish it wouldn’t crash so much. Or require so much administration. I just wish it would work. I never heard a good comment about Vista, but I have heard many good ones about Win7, so maybe what you’re paying for is something that, on at least a basic level, works???
BTW, “raw” as an image file type is not an acronym, it’s the English word, as opposed to cooked/processed. It goes in all caps only if you’re shouting.
The answer is indeed “You need to install some other application program.” And you wouldn’t want to pay for Windows 7. The target market is parties who installed Vista and regretted it, and new machine sales.
The only constant in the world of OSs is their use of a tree-structured file system. In every mainstream OS, a tree structure has been the standard, for 40 years now.
If I were organizing my computer materials for a 90-year timespan, that is about the only framework I would count on as unlikely to change for such a long period.
I gotta say: I love lightroom. As for longevity, they’ve made it trivial to export your entire library as pretty much whatever file format you’d like (original, JPEG, RAW, TIFF, etc.)
thanks to David Blake for the link to microsoft page, there are the codecs, and works very good in windows seven 64 bits.
greets