Future-proofing the tagging of digital photographs.

[lanercost]

Just to quickly share my way of tagging photos using the free software Adobe Bridge:

In the screenshot I've attached, on the right you can see my list of keywords (the words to tag). These you add yourself beforehand then when you've selected your photo(s), just check the box of the keyword(s) you want and they're stored in the image.

On the left you see many of the keywords I've used for this folder; If I want to see all photos taken in Adelaide then I click Adelaide and they're all shown, if I want to see all photos with Anna then I click Anna and they're all shown, etc. and because they're stored in the image itself you're able to search using these tags on any platform, not just in Adobe Bridge.

Tagging like this means you can find any image fast without entering all kinds of words into the filename. How I name my images is simply from the "date taken" info stored in the photos. This way keeps them in chronological order and you know your descendants won't need to ask experts for a date on your photo, it's all there right down to the second.

[bluesofa]

I've done some digging to remind myself where I got to previously.

The <a href="http://www.metadataworkinggroup.or">metadata working group</a> have an old, but useful description of the different standards for storing metadata within a digital image (primarily EXIF, IPTC-IIM and XMP) and where they overlap.

My impression is the new standard is XMP (as developed between Adobe and IPTC) and linked to earlier by Falkyrn.   Ken Watson describes the capability of different software to handle the metadata formats (http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/labelling.html), though perhaps the IPTC have <a href="https://iptc.org/standards/photo-metadata/software-support/">more recent information</a>.  Ken also describes how to visually caption your images as suggested in earlier post by Guy.

I don't think there is an agreed metadata structure for genealogical purposes.  I found <a href=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/075d/6a2dec028a154345a57fb61c279e6050c60a.pdf>this paper</a> from 2012 describing the issue.

While there isn't a standard for genealogy specifically, as Archivos indicated, there are lots of standards out there for archiving.  I was/am uncertain how to use them though.

Perhaps the most common approach is to use keywords to add meta-data, and if most common, perhaps it will be the most long-lasting approach.  Even then, I'm not sure keyword hierarchies are consistently managed between applications.

I'm interested in hearing what others do.  Maybe duplicating metadata is best - in the filename; within EXIF, IPTC, XMP; as a caption; in a separate file; as an annotated hard-copy...

[mike175]

Having read this thread and many of the links with interest I feel my best option for the time being is to continue to use the Windows Tag and Comment features. These seem to be readable by most programming languages (e.g. PHP has a function called "exif_read_data") so it should be easy enough to write a short script to convert the Windows tags to suit whatever system becomes the industry standard in future . . .  if it is ever standardized. I don't feel there is much point in fretting over the long term future at this stage, there are too many "standards" and I have no way of knowing which, if any, will become the "USB" of metadata 

But I will keep watching to see what others are thinking . . .