Annotating Images with IPTC
See also: IptcSpecification, PersonalDataRepository
What is IPTC
IPTC is a standard for annotating JPEG and TIFF digital images within the image itself. It is primarily used by news agencies as a way of making sure that information about an image, and the image itself, do not become accidentally separated. However it is useful to us amateur photographers for exactly the same reason.
The IPTC standard allows lots of different types of information to be stored within the image. Here's a table the most useful tags and how you might use them (you don't have to use them all, choose the ones that are most important for you):
Name |
Usage |
Example |
Caption |
Description of what is going on in the image. |
Adam and Teresa getting crazy with friends at the Martinborough wine festival. |
Keywords |
List of words describing the image. |
Adam, Teresa, Martinborough, New Zealand, Wine, November, 2004 |
Credit |
Name of the photographer |
Adam Shand |
Copyright |
Copyright statement |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. |
City |
City the image was taken in. |
Martinborough |
Province/State |
Province or state the image was taken in. |
Wairarapa |
Country |
Country the image was taken in. |
New Zealand |
Special Instructions |
Instructions about how the image should (not) be used. |
|
Category |
What category the image belongs in. 1 |
2004 Martinborough Wine Festival |
Headline |
A short description of the image. |
Martinborough wine festival. |
Source |
The provider of the image. 2 |
Annotating images well is a lot of work but in my opinion it's well worth it if you have a lot of images and ever want to go back through them looking for either particular images or particular sets of images (eg all the Martinborough pictures).
Getting Started
If you think this all sounds like a good idea first you'll have to get some software which supports
1 There are two types, categories and supplemental categories. Categories are a one or three letter ANPA Wire code to describe the type of image. Supplemental categories allow multiple longer category names. I don't recommend using categories, but I use supplemental categories for my album groupings.
2 Normally this is the name of the newspaper, I put my websites URL here because there isn't a well supported alternative for that.