Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with metadata

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.

Where can I find better music metadata?

imposster — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:47:48 -0800

Need more metadata for my music. I'm looking for track-by-track recording date/performers/composer/etc. mainly for jazz albums. Is there a source out there? Right now, I'm ripping my CD to FLAC with dBpoweramp using the AMG subscription to fill in the metadata. I'm making small changes as I go (mainly to the year and genre). but I'd really like to have the detailed information found in most liner notes. (For the albums I really care about, I'm keeping both the CD and the liners for reference). Is there a service out there that can provide this? AMG's data doesn't seem to go down to that level, nor does Musicbrainz. Certainly other music fans have done this manually already. Are they sharing it somewhere? Thanks for any help.

Expertly Organizing an MP3 Library

dantekgeek — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:36:35 -0800

Organizing a music library for the (very) OCD? Help me put every ID3 in its place! I'm more than a little bit OCD about my music collection. I'm bugged by stupid little things like the fact that a good deal of my files are tagged slightly incorrectly, that I don't have a consistent bit-rate, that album artwork is almost a lost cause, etc. All the standard craziness.

I've played around with MusicBrainz Picard, but that really just seemed to make things worse, since hardly any of the data the app pulled from the database seemed to match up exactly with the reality of my library (conflicting track lengths, missing songs from albums, etc). It was also a pain going back and forth between Picard and iTunes to cross-check things.

If not for the fact that a good portion of my library is already impeccably organized, I'd just run the whole thing through Picard or a similar app. But for fear of distorting what is already nice and shiny, I can't.

I know there have been a few similar questions on Ask before, but none for at least a year or so. I'm hoping some wonderful new tool or strategy has come along since then.

What apps/sites/techniques can you suggest to help in my quest? Or is my vision of metadata perfection a lost cause?

(I use a Mac, for what its worth)

Duplicate Duplicate Metadata Metadata

kenbennedy — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:27:50 -0800

Is there some preference or setting I am missing? Why does my metadata in Aperture get overlaid twice? (Screenshot) See that at the bottom of the picture? How can I make it only show the data once? I have been through the user's manual more than once, so either I missed it, or don't understand what I am doing incorrectly.

What books would teach me about information and data?

Deathalicious — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:58:24 -0800

Let's say I wanted to educate myself to sort-of the equivalent of a Bachelor's Degree in Information and Data (not sure what the real degree would be called, but you get the idea). What should be in my syllabus? Areas of study would include things like informational networks and social networking, tacit and explicit knowledge, parsing and data extraction, data mining, visualization, metadata, information retrieval and storage, plus other things that I'm probably not even aware of. Websites are great, but so are books (maybe excluding $$$ textbooks if possible), podcasts, videos, source code, applications, etc. Assume a relatively high level of technical know-how (including coding skills) but little formal computer science training.

How to I remove metadata from a photo?

Damn That Television — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:04:22 -0800

How do I strip absolutely all information (metadata, file created on, etc) data from a digital picture? I have some digital pictures. I need to make it so that absolutely no information can be gleamed from them -- what camera took them, when they were taken, etc. Is there an industry standard/government standard for removing this information?

How can I help my coworkers create XML documents to store metadata?

gryftir — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:50:44 -0800

Generating XML documents help? I work with the county health department, and have been asked to come up with a way to create, store and manipulate metadata for various datasets we store internally on a network drive. Basically I think the simplest thing to do is to create an xml file stored in the same directory with any dataset. Preferably I can do this with infopath 2003 or free software, and using the Dublin Core standard for metadata. I've seen the 5 year old answers on Dublin Core Metadata from this Ask, but I need to let my coworkers create the data first, and that mostly covers storage/database solutions. Looking through various DC list archives hasn't been helpful. I realize that having an xml file for each dataset may make it hard to actually search and manipulate the data, but at least we'd be storing it somewhere in a standard form.

We have Office 2003 on all the relevant machines, to the best of my knowledge, and I think Infopath 2003 should be able to create forms which create xml compliant with dublin core (either simple or qualified, preferably the later). It would be rather difficult to have our IT department roll out any sort of complex IT solution or have a server setup with the authority I have. I could however use some sort of database file stored on the network drive.

I'd really prefer to have forms or generate the XML programatically, rather then having them hand edit a template or something. The idea is to make storing the data as smooth as possible.

Does anybody have any suggestions for me or strong useful resources that you can point me too? I'm not exactly sure how to take the XML schemas for Dublin Core and create a compliant form from it.

I'm not married to Dublin Core if there is another standard or to infopath 2003 if there is a better program that won't cost anything.

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 do I track my DVD-Rs?

tommorris — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:18:20 -0800

Is there any good, free UNIX/Linux software you can suggest for keeping a searchable index of removable media? I have a large collection of backed up files on DVD-R (about five or six hundred volumes). I have been using a proprietary and rather crufty application called CDFinder. My Mac laptop has become rather less stable recently (and I haven't got enough money for one of them nice new MacBooks), so I've made the leap to a netbook running Linux. This is the one application I can't find a decent equivalent for.

Ideally, I want an application that will maintain a database of all the metadata about the files on burned CD/DVD volumes. That metadata will obviously include the file names, creation/modification dates, but also ID3 data for audio files and the equivalent metadata for videos, photos, PDFs and all the other stuff I haven't really thought about. Search speed isn't tremendously important - it doesn't bother me if it takes fifteen seconds to do a search.

One of the things I would like would be for the data to be in an open format, and for the search tool to be usable from the command line (so I can use it over SSH).

I have done some Googling, but all I can find are the sort of things record collectors would use to keep track of their albums. Not what I want: I basically want UNIX's metadata-aware 'find' or 'locate' commands for unmounted volumes.

I've been thinking about building something like this myself as a fun little open-source project over the Christmas holidays. If someone has a suggestion of an existing project that would do what I want that is free, open source and preferably not tied to any windowing environments (command line ftw!), I'd be greatly appreciative.

Metadata best practice for new department names

alchemist — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:33:53 -0800

metadata metafilter ! How to correctly keep updated metadata in our documents at work after departments change their names? At my workplace we have an unfortunate habit of re-naming departments (i'm not enough of a higher-up to stop this from happening). So "Department A" is now called "Department B", but hasn't changed its function. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for me to see what the best "department name" metadata strategy could be for our Word/pdf documents. How do I keep both a correct history (so I don't have to go back an change every single document to reflect the latest department name), AND, at the same time, keep everything searchable (so that, for example, a new employee who only knows "Department B" by that name, when searching for information can also find documents from when they were called "Department A". What's best practice, or any sort of sane solution ?

Dreading the day it changes to "Department C".....

Any metadata experts ? Please Help !!

Dating Metadata?

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:13:56 -0800

I'm a playa. Well, not really. But how do I keep track of people I talk to from dating sites - what IM client do I need? I message people on dating sites and Myspace and they (occasionally) give me their screenname - usually AIM or Yahoo. My memory isn't the greatest, so now I have a long list of screennames of people that I don't remember. To help, I've started tagging the "alias" or "nickname" with the screenname of the site the person belongs to, but it's not enough. If someone doesn't sign on often, I find myself asking the same boring questions (name, location, etc.) every time, and it doesn't really help making any kind of meaningful connection with people.

Obviously, besides talking to less people, my solution is a database-based IM client. I tried keeping a plain text file, but it was too ponderous to keep up with. Right now I'm using Digsby IM, and it's nice, but doesn't seem to fit the bill. I need something that can quickly and easily store data about each person I contact, and add to as I learn more about them. Having it be searchable would be nice too. Does such a thing exist? I know there are ways to do this with the official AIM and Yahoo clients, but they seem like afterthoughts.

If anyone has encountered this problem or have any other ideas (besides reminding me that I'm spreading myself too thin and meaningful relationships are formed through communication blah blah blah), I would love to hear them!

Meta Descriptions and Keywords for MediaWiki

entropicamericana — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:04:37 -0800

I have a MediaWiki wiki that I've started. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to automatically generate meta keywords and meta descriptions from the articles. What is the best solution for this? I tried to find out how Wikipedia does it, but my Google Fu is weak.

Moving Podcasts to the Correct iTunes Container

sjuhawk31 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:43:46 -0800

How can I move my favorite podcast (which I download manually, because the iTunes feed is a week behind) from the Music Library to the Podcast Library, if for no other reason than it's easier to get to it once I transfer to my iPod? I listen to Smodcast almost religiously. A while back, they stopped putting the newest episode on iTunes the day it came out, switching to a schedule where you have to go to the website to get it on time. I'm fine with that. Problem is, when you download it, it's just a regular ol' MP3 and sits in the iTunes music library. How can I force it to behave otherwise?

Google gives me plenty of ways to move a podcast to the music library, but none to do the other way around. Programs like Lostify let you tag stuff you download from your browser as TV Shows and Movies so they go in the right section, but their FAQ says pretty clearly that they aren't supporting podcast tagging. What's a podcaster to do?

Inserting exposure metadata into scanned photographs

ztdavis — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:13:12 -0800

Is it possible to (and how would you) add shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, lens, and camera metadata to scanned files saved in a .psd format? I have photoshop, lightroom, and bridge. I know how to add tags and change the usual metadata stuff. I just can't figure out how to change these particular fields when they aren't written into the file to begin with as they are with DSLR files.

Creating order from chaos

genghis — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:51:14 -0800

Do we know of a web service where I can feed a song title and artist in the front, and get one single canonical answer to the question of when it was first released? I'm trying to sort out a large (several thousand tracks) music library for an EU-based non-profit radio station.

An alarmingly-high percentage of the tracks in it don't have dates attached to the recording. That's annoying for a number of reporting reasons, but also because there's probably enough songs released before 1957-12-31 in there for them to put together an internet-only oldies station and not have to pay the record companies for the privilege. Most of those songs won't have ISRC numbers either.

I've looked at scrobbler, musicbrainz, and a few other services. Everything I've found thus far either a) doesn't have a date or b) has the date of some much-later CD reissue or c) returns a large number of results, which would require human intervention to decide which is the right answer. Obviously I'm not keen on doing that seven or eight thousand times.

Web services, downloadable databases, command-line programs or scripts... I'm doing most of this work in Linux against a database with shell scripts so any of those would do.

To recap: I want a match on artist and song title, and the earliest release date, and nothing else.

I doubt I'm the first person to have this problem. Any ideas from the collective?

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?

film directory organizing software

beerbajay — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:58:43 -0800

Movie organizing software for directories of film files/subs/etc? I want to add extended metadata (year, director, country, original title, watched?) to each film I have stored. Currently I have everything in nicely named directories, like:
/movies/Title (Original title) (Director, year)/

But this isn't that useful since sometimes I would like to sort/view by director or year or country. Each film has minimally a video file, sometimes subtitle file(s), sometimes cover scans.

I have a copy of J River Media Center, but it doesn't appear to be able to catalog directories as a single unit, but instead only catalogs the individual files, which (a) breaks up the "package" for each film (b) sometimes produces multiple records for the same film if the film has been split into two sections.

I don't need or want any fancy interface; I don't need IMDB data; I don't need cast, crew, etc; I don't need a ratings system; I don't need covers or screenshots; I would be totally satisfied with some extended metadata for each directory that I could show in Explorer.

So, what software can do this for me? I'm on Windows XP, but would be interested in hearing about things that'll work on linux as well.

The 'brary mystique re: MARC, etc.

10ch — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:57:36 -0800

Dear AskMeFi Librarians and Librarian-Wannabes, can you please explain-slash-distinguish between MARCXML, MODS, METS and EAD in terms of why one is better (or even different) than the other? I've never worked in a library and I'm only familiar enough with MARC records to know what they stand for and that they presumably need something like MARCXML, MODS, METS or EAD to make them more system-shareable and human-readable.

There internet is in no short supply of definitions and discussions about these standards, but I need someone to explain it to me (or point me to an explanation) that is in layman's terms and without presuming I have an MLS.

You folks are as bad as us webbies with the acronyms, sheesh!

Thanks.

How do I nicely organize my library of 80 gigs of MP3s?

Nelson — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:07:05 -0800

How do I nicely organize my library of 80 gigs of MP3s? My goal is to get my new Sonos system working nicely and presenting a tidy library of music. Ideally with cover art. It'd also be nice if iTunes would work reasonably well with my music collection, but iTunes is so awful I'm willing to write it off.

I've got 80 gigs of MP3s I've accumulated over the last ten years. They're all organized neatly in directories like "Genre / Artist / Album Name / 01 TrackName.mp3". The m3u tags, though, are a mess, with lots of variations and mistakes. And I have no cover art.

For years I've played my music in WinAmp or via a Squeezebox by just walking my nicely organized directory hierarchy. But newer music software seems to prefer to use m3u tags and categorize things by Artist, Genre, etc. And since my m3u tags are a mess, the resulting catalog is a mess. I can still play stuff via Sonos by walking a directory hierarchy, but it doesn't work very well and I feel like I'm missing out.

I've seen various software products that try to scan your mp3 files and try to correct m3u tags, remove duplicates, download cover art, etc. Do any of the Windows apps work well? Alternately, I still have most of the CDs in a box somewhere. Should I just send them all to a ripping service?

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?

Keeping tags, etc. when uploading to photos Flickr?

Smarson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:53:20 -0800

How do I upload my digital photos to Flickr and make sure the metadata stays intact? Currently I use Picasa as the organizing software for all my pictures. I was using the picasa2flickr plugin to mass upload my edited photos (keywords, captions, etc.), but the most recent Picasa release has borked it.

I've discovered that using the Flickr Uploadr (2.5, not 3.0) allows me to upload photos and will keep the metadata intact as long as I don't use uploadr to resize the files since that strips the IPTC/EXIF data. Not wanting to upload 50 to 100 giant sized images at a time, I've taken to resizing photos in Picasa, putting them in a seperate folder, and then dropping them into the Uploadr. Only problem there is that Picasa doesn't have a straight forward resizing tool (that I've found) short of the 'Export' function which likes to create a lot of folders.

Long story short, this seems like so much extra work for something that should be pretty straight forward.

Question 1: Other than Picasa, is there a photo managing software that will allow me to add metadata (tags, captions, etc.) and make it easy for me to do batch uploads to Flickr (I'm not afraid to spend money on this solution)?

Question 2: The picasa2flickr creator suggests rolling back form Picasa (build 37.27) to Picasa (buid 37.23) in order to keep the plugin's functionality. If I do this, do I risk corrupting/losing any data/images that have been edited with the 37.27 build? I know I'd need to back up the originals of edited photos that Picasa keeps squirreled away.

Full disclosure: I'm barely an armature photographer with a Flickr pro account. The only edits I make are titles, keywords/tags, and captions with the occasional red-eye reduction and crop.

Managing Photos Locally

daviss — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:05:08 -0800

I need an equivalent of Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that can be hosted locally on our network. I have about 1,000 pictures of art and architecture that I am putting into a database that will be accessed by various researchers. The pictures will be tagged and commented on, and I would like the researcher to be able to look up pictures by keyword.

I know that Flickr is capable of doing this, but for the sake of professionalism, I would like the database to be either on its own dedicated domain, or stored locally on our network.

Strip Metadata on MS Word for Mac?

eustacescrubb — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:08:01 -0800

Microsoft provides this for Windows users to strip metadata from MS Word files, but does not provide one for Mac Word users. Anyone know of a plugin/AppleScript or application that will do this on a Mac?

ipod-to-itunes metadata syncing: help a girl out.

lockse — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 09:44:12 -0800

I rate my music on my ipod as I listen through it, and I'm trying to get several thousand ratings from the ipod back into itunes. It doesn't seem like itunes can do this for me. (That's stupid!) I found this script, which also has failed to work for me. Need help using the script, or itunes, or finding another alternative. The Synch script actually didn't work for me for weeks - i kept getting an error message after it ran for over an hour, and the operation wouldn't complete. But just this morning it completed, to my delight, so I closed and re-opened itunes, and then nothing - the ratings did NOT transfer into my library. SO I turn to you. Help a sister integrate portable metadata into her master archive! Am I using the script wrong? Is there really a way iTunes can gather my ratings from my ipod (without being entirely synced)? Is there another way?

Is there a way to search PDF metadata in Vista?

chrisWhite — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:30:46 -0800

Is there a way to search PDF metadata in Vista? I've been playing with PDF Metadata in Vista with Acrobat Pro and it looks great, but I can't seem to search for author information, keywords or anything of the kind. Is there something I'm doing wrong or do I need to install Google Desktop, Copernic or the like to actually be able to search my PDf's?

Thanks!