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Tagging your images is so cool, compared with using plain old folders…at least that’s what everyone says But how do your carefully created keywords get attached to your images? What are EXIF, IPTC and XMP? And most of all…why should you care about all of these acronyms? Understanding the different types of image metadata will help you better manage your pictures.

IPTC contains information about the contents of the picture

IPTC contains information created by the photographer and entered into the IPTC fields using some software program. The key difference is that the information contained in the IPTC fields represents information about the content of the picture. It is obvious that a camera would have no idea about the subject of the picture, so there is no IPTC metadata in any pictures when you shoot them. Your camera knows nothing about IPTC…and it shouldn’t anyway. Here are some examples of IPTC metadata fields:

• Country
• Subject
• Category – a list of preset categories
• Additional Category – this is free form and you can add text in here
• Keywords – this is where you place your keywords. This is probably the most widely used IPTC field

Again, as you can see, this data is about the content of the picture and you alone as the photographer can enter this data. This is where you need to use software like: Adobe Lightroom, iTag, iMatch, ACDSee Pro and others to manipulate the IPTC information for your pictures. Once you add this information in your software you have to make sure you save it to each image file. Otherwise all this information will stay only in your software.

What’s the point of all this image metadata acronyms?

Again…let’s recap: EXIF contains technical information about a picture while IPTC (and XMP) contains information about the content of a picture. Remember that this information is saved as part of your image file. This means that your image file size will increase…very little though because this information is simple text. The whole point of saving metadata along with each image is to provide information about the image: both technical and content information. So, when your image “travels”, the information about the image “travels” with your image file.

Do you really need to save metadata?

Why would you need them when you can have all this information stored in your software? Well…it’s pretty simple. If you don’t save all this information with each picture, then nobody else but you (using your software) would be able to see this information. If you don’t care about the portability of your metadata (including keywords), then you don’t really care about IPTC (or XMP for that matter). But if you want to pass your pictures to news agencies or most photo sharing websites, you need to do this because they will want to know information about the content of your pictures without having to open and view each picture. This is it on this subject…at least for now.

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Tagged as: EXIF, IPTC, Metadata, XMP