Picture Metadata and Face Tags: What Software to Write and Read them?

Question

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.

Answer 1

Here are two more programs that may fit into your nice overview table above.

1. DigiKAM (OpenSource, free). People tagging is present, stored as XMP regions. You just need to configure digiKam so that the XMP data is stored inside the files: Configure / Metadata / Behaviour / Face Tags (including face areas) (Check this checkbox to let digiKam write the face data into the files.)

2. Also, if you've got a Synology NAS, there is Photo Station 6, with face tagging, storing as XMP.

I'm primarily concerned about the possibility to add people tags manually, and stored in the same way as Windows Photo Gallery. I've not tried any automatic recognition in the above that may be possible, perhaps not in both of them.

I've still not decided what to use for myself, so that's the reason for me being here. I've tried the two programs above but neither of them is as simple as MS Photo Gallery (that is no longer supported, and a bit hard to install even if it's possible). And there seems to be some kind of incompatibility between them, when it comes to automatically rotated photos ("portrait" with highest sides on the Y axes), taken with camera. When I download portrait positioned face tagged photo from the NAS (PhotoStation) and open them in DigiKam, then the face rectangles are not on the correct places (I'm not sure which program to blame).

It seems Lightroom (also Classic) is now only available as part of the subscription from Adobe, so I don't think I'd use that for my home photos.

Answer 2

Even though it has "EXIF" in the name, Exiftool can read and write all of these standards. It's very powerful and easy to script so you can write to all the locations you like in the way you need for the other software to understand.

In fact, this is the tool used in the blog post you link. So, I second that recommendation.

Answer 3

Seems Adobe Lightroom Classic is a good choice for my needs.

When I add metadata to images (Title, description and photo Taken date), it seems to update any related tags for EXIF, XMP and IPTC. Regarding face tags, it will save them in xmp-mwg-rs and also adds a keyword tag to other related metadata. Also, for Geotagging, it has a map module and I can drag and drop images in the needed map area. Also when saving geo-tagging metadata, it saves them in EXIF and also MWG's XMP, and will also fetch city, district and country name.

Answer 4

I use Geosetter, even though it is focused towards geotagging, the app uses exiftool behind the scenes an also provides decent metadata editing abilities of the fields you mentioned (Captions, Descriptions, Keyword/Tags, Location info), with support for EXIF, IPTC and XMP. Geosetter can read MP Region (xmp-mwg-rs) and MS People Tags, but it does not provide a way to edit face tags. For face detection and tagging I still rely on Windows Photo Gallery.

Also, Geosetter allows you to include custom exiftool operations upon saving changes back to the file, so it is quite versatile. I use them to copy certain tags to their XMP equivalents, specifically ensuring location info such as Sublocation, City, Country are copied to their IPTC 2008 Spec equivalents.

Answer 5

TagThatPhoto is a relatively new tool that supports reading & writing of tags per your list below. I have been using for about three months now on about 20,000 images and it appears to have very good face recognition accuracy and cooperates with XnView and Win File Explorer.

• 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)