Best practices for recording photo metadata? What I'd like to be able to do inside, plus many questions about what's possible today or likely to be possible in the future.
Let's start with my ideal vision: I'd like to be able to record various metadata within image files, and have them automatically and correctly transferred to photo-sharing websites, apps, etc., that I might upload/import said images to. The basic idea is that I'd like to associate the metadata with each photo once, so if I upload them to
Flickr today, and to
Smugmug in six months, and a website or app which doesn't exist today two years from now, I only have to enter all the metadata once and don't have to re-enter it for each new website/app I'm using.
The particular information I'd like to be able to record includes:
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Time/Date, ideally including time zone, although the EXIF specification doesn't record time zone
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Location, from GPS data (lat./long./alt.)
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Title
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Caption (or call these two "short caption" and "long caption" or whatever you want; the point is that in some places a description of a few words is appropriate, for some several sentences may be; I'd like to be able to record both)
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Keywords, a.k.a. tags (but subject tags, a la Flickr, not to be confused with the metadata fields in general which are also sometimes called tags)
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Copyright statement
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License statement (e.g., a Creative Commons license)
I've seen
this website and
these guidelines. From the latter I gather there's three standards in at least moderate use, EXIF, IPTC-IIM, and XMP. I know websites such as Flickr and Smugmug currently read EXIF data and make use of some of the fields; are there any that read IPTC-IIM or XMP? Is this likely in the future? Is it worth even bothering to try to record metadata in IPTC-IIM or XMP? If so, any suggestions for tools to use (under Windows XP and/or Vista)? I have an EXIF editor, so I don't need recommendations for one of those, but if there are tools which allow one to edit EXIF plus one or both of the others, I'd be interested
Date/time and GPS data are already pretty well in place. Date/time is recorded in EXIF by the camera when I take the picture (except for not encoding a time zone), and I've managed to figure out how to geotag them in bulk in the EXIF data if I have a GPS log. And date/time and lat./long. are already used by Flickr and Smugmug. What about other fields (where the fields even exist)? Are titles, captions, license, etc., appropriately made use of, or do they just sit there, visible in the EXIF data but not applied further? What's the status in other websites or apps? Any ideas about what it's likely to be in the near future?
If there currently isn't a good/useful way to record some of this metadata in the image file itself, any recommendations for recording it elsewhere (in a separate file or files) so it would be relatively easy to add it to the image files if it became possible/useful in the future?
If it makes a difference, I only need to do this for JPG files. That's how they come off my point-and-shoot, so I don't have RAW files.
Any comments on the "big-picture" (heh) issues I've implicitly brought up here, or recommended reading on the topic, are welcome too even if I didn't specifically ask about them.
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You're not a Mac user, so I guess LightRoom is what you'd use and I'm pretty sure you can find a pre-compiled exiftool binary in case you needed it.
posted by Brian Puccio at 7:36 AM on October 30, 2009