These past three days were a nightmare to me as I was trying to find THE way to store picture metadata for my 5000 photo archive the correct way.
Since I read this great blog post from Carl Seibert I found out that embedded Picture Metadata world is a Hell. We seem to have three standards regarding embedding metadata into image files themselves. EXIF, IPTC's IIM and Metadata Working Group's XMP.
As you see, each photo editing/organizing software is literally choosing what it likes to read. And about face tags, the only way to store them correctly is in XMP.
What I ultimately want is to have this metadata in my pictures:
- Date Taken (The date image was taken. I guess this is mainly stored in EXIF. some of my pictures are scanned old photos. so I need to manually enter this info for them.)
- Location (The Location the image was taken. same as above it seems to be stored in EXIF and I need to be able to manually add it to some images)
- Description (a short description of the story of the image if available)
Tags or Keywords ( a fail-safe alternative to true face tag info. just naming people in Picture as tags.)
Face Tags (XMP's standard face tags. which is face location and a name)
Here is where I desperately need help:
I want software that helps me write the above metadata for my archive to XMP, IIM, and EXIF's related locations. So other software can at least find what it likes to find, in one of them.