[WARNING! I’m not a natural English speaker: sorry for my halting English]

Recently Canon introduced a new RAW format: CR3. CR2 has been based on TIFF format, while CR3 has been built on the QuickTime format.

Maybe you’re thinking that file formats are a techy and nerdy thing because you only use a software application that reads and/or writes these values, sometimes they convert these values through other formats (RAW –> JPG) and it isn’t important to you what’s the underlying technology, patents or deals between companies.

As a microstock photographer I’m interested in METATAGS. Metatags are my personal hell because every microstock agency/licensee requires three mandatory meta-tags: title, description, keywords. Sometimes you can avoid title OR description, depending on agency requirements, but before submitting images to agencies, you have to index them using meta-tags.

Many of us are non-exclusive “contributors”: this means we upload and submit images to a number of agencies. The same image on many agencies. And of course, we submit MANY images to MANY agencies. So, every image needs to be indexed. The good news is that EXIF/IPTC data EMBEDDED in images are always auto-imported by the whole of (micro)stock agencies.

But when coming to MOV footage files this is not true. There are only a very limited number of agencies reading the embedded meta-data, most commonly indexed using Adobe Bridge software.

CR3 format is QuickTime based, and the BAD news is that even the most powerful meta-data read/write software in the world, Phil Harvey’s Exiftool isn’t capable of reading/writing CR3 exif/iptc metadata. And so is when it comes to quicktime (MOV) files.

Maybe I’m wrong: I always used XMP sidecar files with CR2 files and it went well when I converted them in JPG files, uploaded and submitted them. So XMP could be the solution.

Working with MOV files there is NO XMP “sidecar” solution. The most important microstock agencies can’t read embedded MOV medatada: Shutterstock can’t. They often offer you a “CSV solution”: you can prepare a CSV file containing the values instead of the metadata embedded fields and upload that CSV in a different moment: another time-consuming operation.

So I need to prepare some auto-extraction of CSV files for each agency format based on some meta-data written into the MOV files by Adobe Bridge. Anyway I guess that kind of data is XMP (not sidecar fille).