What is Metadata?
Information, that's what <smile>
Metadata is all the information you want to preserve about an image. Anything that’s an image—scans of documents, downloaded documents, photos, prints, photos of artifacts. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s an image file.
There are hundreds of IPTC fields, and companies select and use only the fields that are relevant to their needs. The SaveMetadata group looked at all of them and selected the ones we thought best suited to genealogists. If there were several description-type fields, we selected the one we thought appropriate. This does not mean that companies use our choices. The chart below illustrates common IPTC fields.
EXIF stores technical data relating to the taking of an image recorded by a camera.
People: Who’s in the photo or who took the picture?
Location: Where was the photo taken?
Caption: This is a brief story of the image as a title, but this can also be a field called description.
Date: Some programs/websites allow for a span of dates or a circa date.
Album: The beauty of digital photo organizers is that you can create multiple digital albums for the same photo.
Keywords: Ever wanted to look at all the bridal photos in your family at one time? Use the keyword “Wedding” or “Brides”, for instance.
Copyright Details: Who owns the legal rights to the image or who took/owns the picture? For example, you’d use this field for documents downloaded from Ancestry.com or the name of the professional photographer who took a photo of your family.
What metadata fields do you think you’d use most often?
Great information. I would wish for a place to indicate writing that was on the back and who wrote it, as well as provenance of the photo and a rating for the accuracy of the identification. I record those things in a collection log, and each person who gives me even one photo has a “collection”, so I’d need that field too. I guess I could use album field for that but I started out organizing my own stuff as a teen copying more archival methods. I would definitely like to read more about metadata and standards work.
One issue I've had is that some sites will only let you download as a PDF and I cannot add or change metadata.