Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with EXIF

Best practices for photo metadata?

DevilsAdvocate — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:14:09 -0800

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:
*Time/Date, ideally including time zone, although the EXIF specification doesn't record time zone
*Location, from GPS data (lat./long./alt.)
*Title
*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)
*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)
*Copyright statement
*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.

Ho to make photoshop save photos?

-harlequin- — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:02:23 -0800

How can I save JPG images in Photoshop CS so that a digital camera can read them? Cheap crappy software can do this easily, but no matter what file settings I use in Photoshop, I've never been able to get any of my digital cameras to be able to read any JPG that was written by Photoshop - I have to load and re-save them with other piece of software to get them to work. Surely there is a way to make Photoshop save JPG files that cameras can read? My impression is that (naming conventions and so forth aside) there is a JPEG standard that most or nearly all cameras read, rather than every camera having it's own random special requirements.

I want a way to start saving files in that standard, because I'll be using a camera as an image storage/display device, and want to load the memory card with images and graphics in addition to photos it has taken, but right now, I have to individually process each file to do this, or the camera won't read it, and it's driving me nuts.
(I also don't want to save as RAW or TIFF)

Thanks!

Does an application exist that will allow you to change the exif data of a jpeg photos make and model??

antisocialiting — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:24:15 -0800

Does an application exist that will allow you to change the exif data of a jpeg photos make and model?? I have tried 10 applications today and none of them work. If one exist could you please tell me what it is. The only one I didnt try yet is adobe lightroom. I have an iphone the only way to keep the exif data stating it is an iphone is to use the built in camera application. I put 3 different apps like darkroom etc on and they remove that exif data and a lot more from the photo, so I would like an application to just add the make and model in so when I upload it to flickr it will have the apple iphone exif data show up. thanks for any help

Does cross-platform, self-contained photo management exist?

pbh — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:27:40 -0800

I'm a single user looking for an easier way to browse my photos. It looks like I need a photo management tool like iPhoto, F-Spot, et al. The catch: if possible, I would like whatever solution I end up with to be cross-platform and self-contained (because I'm scared of entering all of my information into a proprietary database that I can't get my data out of later). Unfortunately, I seem to have outgrown using folders to organize my photos. I'm looking to organize on the order of thousands of photos, but I probably don't need the sort of workflow tools that a real professional photojournalist/photographer would need. I'd really like something that can show thumbnails of various sizes, let me browse fluidly by date, and has some basic tagging and set functionality, but I probably don't need much more than that.

My big requirement is that I'd like this thing to make use of EXIF or similar in order to avoid having some database that I can never get my data out of again. Ideally, I would like it to be cross-platform, though if it's not, that's not a huge problem. I'm using Ubuntu Linux, though I'm also curious if there is something that uses EXIF for organization on another platform.

Photo management questions seem fairly common on AskMeFi, e.g., photo management over a shared network, digital photo storage management, and so on, but I didn't see anything that answered this particular question.

Is there any decent photo management software that doesn't tie you into a proprietary database / data format that you can't get away from or export later?

How do I best encode the intended audience of a photo inside a JPG file?How do I best encode the intended audience of a photo inside a JPG file?

hoverboards don't work on water — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:05:27 -0800

How do I best encode the intended audience of a photograph inside a JPG file? I have a collection of photos (about 30,000) which I would like to share. While I am happy for anyone to see most of them, there are some I only want to share with friends, some I only want to share with family, and some I want to remain private entirely - like Flickr's options.

As far as I can tell, there is no metadata standard for encoding intended audience, i.e. nothing like the IPTC or EXIF standards for encoding a caption, or the ISO speed.

My current plan is to use Digikam to simply tag photos "friends", "family", or "private", with none-of-the-above meaning everybody.

Is this the best way to do it?

How can I edit EXIF orientation meta data?

yerfatma — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:47:21 -0800

How can I edit EXIF orientation meta data? I need to be able to explicitly set the orientation of a set of images for a test case I'm writing. I've burned through a bunch of tools this morning trying to find one that would let me do it:

Exifer
ABCView
AttributeMagic
Adobe Lightroom & Bridge
Ifranview

along with a few command-line tools and scripts. It's entirely possible I missed something obvious, but few of the tools even displayed the Orientation data. None were willing to let me edit it.

Is there another tool or another way to set this without using a camera?

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network?

macinchik — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:46:17 -0800

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network? I'm in the exact same situation as the person who asked this question on the topic, more than a year ago.

To summarize: "I need to find networked photo management software, similar in function to Picasa or ACDSee, but with the ability to share "tags" between multiple users over a network. The products I've been able to find all allow tagging, but those tags are available only to that user, and my company needs to search the photo tags without each user having tagged each photo individually."

Is iView still the way to go? It seems likely but I must say I am hesitant to adopt it since it was recently acquired by Microsoft. There's something called Portfolio Server but it is out of our price range.

Do programs like Aperture, Bridge, Lightroom, etc., allow you to edit metadata "within" the photo files, so that if a group of people keeps their photos on a shared drive, those photos will indeed begin to collaboratively accumulate tags and other sorting information?

Lost a 30D! But have hope.

sirliberal — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 15:30:51 -0800

Lost Camera! How can I search the 'net's for it? I lost a Canon 30D SLR camera. Games up right, ill never find it. The kicker is I have my email address set in the camera, so any photos it takes will be tagged with my email address unless said finder happens to know about this, and how to change it (you need the Canon software, and its hidden in a menu).

So! How can I search the web for EXIF data, specifically my email address or the camera serial number? Are there services that offer this? Would it be worth emailing flickr, or the other major sources? I would have to assume if someone picked up a 30D eventually it would get a photo from it posted on the net, and as long as EXIF survives, it should show up!

Geotagging Photos on Ubuntu

blue_beetle — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:46:30 -0800

How do I geotag photos on Ubuntu Linux? Windows users can use Picasa + GoogleEarth, but this doesn't seem to be an option on Linux (the apps work, but there is no menu option for it). Is there a geotagging app that will attach Lat/Long to EXIF data in linux? I have many gigs of photos, so I want to do this locally, not upload all my photos to a web site. Suggestions?

Rename files with EXIF data?

ChazB — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 06:58:44 -0800

DigitalPhotoFilter: I'm really bad for remembering when I took certain pictures so I need to batch rename a bunch of photos using the date and time EXIF info. Is there an easy way to do this on a Windows XP machine? Yes, I searched for other posts but nothing I found really answered my question or explained if/how this was able to be done. Any help would be great.

JPG metadata help?

starvingartist — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:30:18 -0800

Does the JPG description information work in Windows XP? We have a large number of photos in my office of volunteers, and my boss would like a way to keep track of who is in what photo so years down the line we can remember. When I right click on a photo and go the properties, I can enter description data into the "Summary" tab, but it doesn't save the information. Is this just broken in XP? How else can I use the JPG metadata? I did download ExifPro 1.0, but I would be the only person who would know how to use it and I don't know how long I'll be staying at this job.

How can I organise my mass of digital photos?

dance — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 12:34:11 -0800

I've got a directory filled with the digital photos I and friends have taken over some eight years. It's a disorganised mess with no coherent, standardised naming format. I'd like to: -remove duplicates -sort, rename or place in folders images based on EXIF data or content I'm on Mac OS X but could possibly gain access to a Windows box if necessary. Any ideas?

Batch EXIF Tagging?

muckster — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:34:35 -0800

Is there an EXIF wiz in the house? I have a large number of photos that have their "date taken" in the filename (YYMMDD-##.jpg, to be exact), but they have no EXIF info. Before I upload them to flickr, I'd like to change that. Since it's a lot of pictures, I'm looking for a way to automate the process (plus it's a matter of principle, since the information is already digital I shouldn't have to do it by hand.)

I know about EXIFer, but it doesn't seem to have this kind of batch function. Is there any other program that will let me batch-process these files and add EXIF information taken from the filename? I know there are taggers that do this kind of thing for mp3s, so why not for EXIF? Thankyoumuch.

EXIF data and Photoshop

Necker — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 06:18:48 -0800

Photoshop advice please. Is it possible to edit EXIF data? I have a photo, EXIF data included and complete, at 1600x1200. But the image needs to be resized to 600x450. But a simple resize won't do because I only want a portion of the original image. Here's what I did.

I created a "file>new" and set the canvas size to 600x450. I resized the original image to 1000x750 (so that the portion of the photo, the subject matter I want to preserve, is about the size that I ultimately want it to be). Then, on the original photo, I selected-all and copied... went to the new canvas and pasted the image as a new layer. Now on the new canvas, I grabbed the layer and dragged it around until it was "centered" the way I wanted it.

So basically I ended up with a new image that was slightly smaller than the original image and cropped into a smaller canvas. I don't doubt that I've done this the hard way, maybe not. But I did end up with the image I wanted. Problem is, the EXIF data on the new image is today's date, etc... instead of the original EXIF data. My photoblog depends on accurate EXIF data.

How can I fix this?

If I knew how to create a "select box" (if that's what it's called) at a perfect 600x450, then I wouldn't have this problem... I wouldn't have to create the new canvas. I hope all this makes sense.

Editing photo metadata

keswick — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:00:35 -0800

I've decided to start editing metadata in my photographs. I want to add keywords via Photoshop CS. My question is, if I add keywords to a JPG, when I save it, will it recompress the image and thus degrade it?

I'm looking for a way to batch-add Exif metadata to a bunch of jpeg files on WinXP.

cbrody — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:38:57 -0800

I'm looking for a way to batch-add Exif metadata to a bunch of jpeg files, specifically the picture-taken date, on WinXP. Any ideas? The only program I've found that claims to do this, Ulead's Photo Explorer, invariably crashes whenever I try to do a batch edit.