On Wed, December 2, 2009 08:30, jonathan turner wrote: > Hello, can anyone explain to me exactly what metadata is? > > My understanding is that it's all the technical data from the camera, > embedded within the file. However, I wandered if any captioning I give to > an image will also be included in this. > > I caption stuff in the 'file info' tool in Photoshop. I wander whether > someone without access to PS could read the captions in another piece of > software, such as photomechanic etc? "Metadata" is a general term for "information about the photo". The "data" is the photo itself. There are many different formats and standards for recording metadata. Photoshop had some of its own, basic JPEG gave a caption slot, and pretty much everything supports "EXIF" (primarily for information from the camera -- exposure and such comes from here) and "IPTC" (Originally a standard for newswire photos; caption, keyword, etc. info). In my experience, Photoshop is using the IPTC fields primarily for metadata I add. Photo Mechanic understands those (I usually do it the other way -- applying batches of metadata in PM before I get the photo into Photoshop). There are cases where Photo Mechanic will store metadata in a "sidecar" xmp file (a file with the same name as your image, in the same directory, with the extension ".xmp"); this is partly configurable in PM setup. I'm not sure all those cases interoperate with Photoshop. The free Windows photo viewer Irfan View is pretty good at IPTC and EXIF too; generally everything supports them these days. So, generally speaking, the odds are pretty good of one piece of software being able to find the caption you gave a photo with another piece of software. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
