Metadata display

Walter

My usual method of adding information to photos (jpeg) that have been taken with a phone or digital camera involves viewing the image in Irfanview and adding text to an IPTC field called “Caption (description)”. According to the PhotoMe app, this is field 2:120. This text doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in Tonfotos for digital/phone photos. Is there some way for me to configure which metatdata displayed? Oddly (to me) older images that were created with a scanner do seem to display these texts.

Andrey

Walter the thing is that Tonfotos supports EXIF and XMP metadata, but it does not support IPTC at this moment. All those formats actually do pretty much the same thing with some differences, but IPTC seems to be least popular, while XMP becoming a de-facto standard to store things like tags and comments, while EXIF is still the place where GPS data is stored by cameras.

It still not clear for me should we add IPTC support to Tonfotos or we can safely ignore it. We will continue monitor users feedback on that topic.

Walter

Andrey If XMP is the new standard, does anyone know of an automated way to get information out of the IPTC fields into the XMP fields? I’ve been using IPTC for many years and probably have about 25k photos, so this would really come in handy.

Andrey

Walter well, I would not necessarily say “XMP is the new standard”, because there is no uniformity in what app supports which of the standards, which version of it, and to what extent. In development of Tonfotos we test agains compatibility with Windows Explorer, Windows Photo and just a few most popular commercial photo management apps, but we obviously cant test agains all software which is out there. But yes, it looks like XMP metadata seems to be more preferable than others, at least as I see it. Every software in our compatibility list works well with metadata stored as XMP.

If you really want to dive into this rabbit hole, then the default go-to tool for that is exiftool. This is open source command line utility, selflessly maintained by single person, and over the years it became the reference tool for dealing with image metadata. It is quite low level tool, but it does the job.

Every time we have doubts in what is correct way to interpret this or that particular field in metadata, we check how exiftool does that and use same approach.