We used to write important information on the back of photographs. Today they are digital, but we would still like to remember, years from now, where who and what is in those photos we took.
Wrestling the information into the filename might be a good idea. It assures us that the metadata (descriptive info) is copied along with the data (the file). However, it’s not an elegant solution for most common filesystems, since they place restrictions on the length of filenames and character sets used. Ideally, a block of descriptive metadata should replace filenames altogether.
Most modern file formats include an internal metadata format (JPEG has Exif, MP3 has ID3), and maybe the solution is to use several metadata implementations (de facto standards). But what I need is to be able to take a piece of text, an image, or a web page snapshot, and associate it to an arbitrary file. I also want the associated data to accessible from the context of that file, be it that of a text viewer, media player, or file manager.
Is there a metadata standard, or is that just an oxymoron? I mean, metadata can be, by definition, all types of data. So writing such a standard would mean to anticipate all future kinds of data.
Is metadata necessary? You can argue that there is no end to metadata and that it’s pointless. Yet we still find ourselves appending notes to images, tagging cats, and blogging about other people’s creations.
Udim:
The grandfather of photo metadata is the International Press Telecommunications Council, or IPTC as most photographers know it. You can find a good deal of info on their site (http://www.iptc.org/). I have a short history of the IPTC metadata standard (and yes it is a standard) on my website at (http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/iptc_naa.html).
Last year, I was invited to speak at the First International Photo Metadata Conference in Florence, about the use of photo metadata in the Stock Photography community. If you are interested you can see that presentation as well as those of all of the speakers, by visiting (http://www.phmdc.org/).
I volunteer for the Stock Artists Alliance, a trade organization for stock photographers, for which I co-authored a paper that received a wee bit of attention in 2006 called the Metadata Manifesto. You can see that and our blog at (http://metadatamanifesto.blogspot.com/).
This same trade organization received an award from the US Library of Congress and will be using those monies for conducting a number of surveys to determine the use of various embedded image metadata standards in the upcoming months. News of that will be posted to the MM blog mentioned above. In addition, a website will be created showing how to embed IPTC and XMP within image files using a number of popular applications.
Beyond IPTC, there is XMP, and Dublin Core, which have a number of overlapping or shared fields between them. A google search on IPTC Standards, XMP metadata, or Dublin Core will give you lots of reading material. Hope that helps in your quest.
David Riecks
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