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[joshhuggins]

First off I'm sure this has been covered in depth but I've exhausted my searching energy with no luck, so sorry I've just about finished tagging all my family photos and was getting ready to show my wife to access everything and decided to see if Vista's Window Photo Gallery was able to read the tagged info but alas it can not. So I started thinking, will anything besides MC be able to use this tag data? Is it using a standard or some proprietary tagging system? I want to tag my photos so that the tag information is as flexible as MP3 tags. Is this possible in MC? In any other image software? I love MC and it's my only media management software, but I share this data with others who do not use it and would like to share all the hard work and flexablity I've put into tagging my family history in MC. Any suggestions or better search parameters? Thanks for any info and guidance, it's really, really, really appreciated.

[DarkPenguin]

I'm not real sure.  I know we support some of the IPTC fields.  So you might want to do a search on that.  One thing that I've finally figured out (sorta) is that everything but the keywords field is useless.  (From an organization standpoint.)  Everything supports keywords.  They're easy.

Jim N knows more about this.

[joshhuggins]

Yeah keywords is the only thing Windows Photo Gallery seems to recognize and a few other apps mentioned. Maybe for the wishlist would be a way to have MC add each MC field value as a unique keyword? Not really idea because then you loose the power of being able to use the expressions, but if it's a case of keywords is always going to be the only field that translates into other apps, that would be better than nothing for now. I'm surprised that there isn't a Exif type standard for this type of info in Jpegs. Maybe there is but just haven't seen it yet. I'll dig into the IPTC searching next. Thanks for the lead.

[marko]

NEW: Reads IPTC info from JPEG images...

The current mappings are here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=34686.msg236580#msg236580

[caption] works for most other apps I've tried too.
Recently, I've found that in MC, the Copyright © tag is read only, so I have to use a different app to set the tag on my images. Once set though, MC reads it just fine.

-marko.

[Qythyx]

I read through this thread on and referenced one about the IPTC tags, but I'm still at a loss. Can someone clarify this a bit?

What I'm trying to do is tag my photos with some basic info such that those tags are visible in various applications. Right now I really want them to be visible in MC (of course), Windows Vista file properties, and SmugMug (and ideally other similar photo sites).

In MC I tried entering data in the Caption, Places, People, and Genre fields, but those don't seem to show up in the other apps, except for Caption that appeard as "Comments" in Windows file properties.

So, what are "standard" tags for photos and what are their equivalents in MC? Are there are FAQs on tagging photos?

Thanks.

[aussie1]

You can read a good summary of the ITPC-NAA standards at http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/iptc_naa.html. I found the table at the bottom of the article helpful. The mappings between ITPC and MC are at the URL referenced above (http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/iptc_naa.html) and on the Wiki (http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php/Photo_Tagging).

Notice that MC maps Genre to Category in ITPC. But in the ITPC spec, the category field is meant to hold a code which is usually one character and can be up to three characters long. The code corresponds to the ANPA Wire Category codes. These are basically the sections of a newspaper because the ITPC specs were designed for the transmission of digital images within the newspaper industry. (IPTC stands for "International Press Telecommunications Council." ANPA and NAA both stand for Newspaper Association of America.)

MC's people field does not map to anything in ITPC. I suspect it is always stored in a MJMD tag which is only read by MC, but haven't verified. Adobe's products (probably the standard setter) and others tend to store people in the Keywords field.

MC combines three ITPC fields (City, Province State and Country) to make Places. But the syntax isn't clear. What is the delimiter that MC uses to divide the entry in Places into three separate fields when writing the tag? I never figured this out. If I tag City, State and Country using a different program, it seems to import properly. But I couldn't get it to work going the other direction. Similarly, I was able to tag the caption field using a different program and then import into MC, but I couldn't get it to work going the other direction. It probably works somehow but at this point...

...I concluded that if you want to do standards based tagging of your images beyond "keywords" then MC is not there yet. It is much better to tag with something else and then import into MC. Image tags made in MC aren't very portable to other programs. Personally, I use RoboGeo to geocode my images and Adobe Lightroom for everything else. Photoshop, of course, does it too. Lightroom and Photoshop are expensive products. Other users have probably found tools which are much more affordable.

[jimn]

MC combines three ITPC fields (City, Province State and Country) to make Places. But the syntax isn't clear. What is the delimiter that MC uses to divide the entry in Places into three separate fields when writing the tag? I never figured this out. If I tag City, State and Country using a different program, it seems to import properly. But I couldn't get it to work going the other direction. Similarly, I was able to tag the caption field using a different program and then import into MC, but I couldn't get it to work going the other direction. It probably works somehow but at this point...

The Places field does not get written out (if changed). The Caption field should get written out.

Besides Caption and Keywords, the exchange between MC and IPTC does not make a very good fit. The situation should get better with the migration to XMP, a metadata standard that encompasses IPTC, EXIF and many other schemas. MC 12 already reads in XMP and writing to XMP in on the way. For now, this is still limited to IPTC fields, but can get expanded. We may even develop a jriver schema for XMP.

JimN

[Qythyx]

Thanks for the clarifications. I guess I'll just stick with keywords for now. I didn't really want to go overboard on tagging anyway, so that should be fine.