I’m assembling a pile of historical images for powerpoint and website purposes. Most of the images are JPEGs.
I want to attach some historical notes with each file (like the source, date, remarks, etc.) that will not show on the actual image. All that is a little too cumbersome to put on the file name. I want to be able to click on the image or go into some buried place inside the file and see my custom caption info.
I’ve noticed that some types of images, like Photoshop files, come with hidden features – like a tab with writable captions – in their files’ “properties.” But none my JPEGs appear to have have such an option; they just have a bare-bones “general” tab in their file “properties.”
I believe this can be done using a feature of MS windows called ‘streams’ (or something like that)
I know little about it, I am sure another doper can go into more detail, but basically it is a feature that makes it possible to attach data of any type to a different ‘stream’ of the same file. So you could hide a document with a jpeg, and all jpeg viewing software would see it only as a jpeg file.
The data you’re talking about is “EXIF” data in a JPG file. Do a google search for “EXIF editor” and you’ll find a variety of programs that let you put stuff in there. I don’t have any actual experience with any of them, though, so I can’t recommend one.
Are you sure you’re examining the JPEGs’ properties page from within Windows Explorer, and not IE or something? If you’re on the web, you will not be able to edit image EXIF data. For me at least, there’s a “Summary” tab that lets me edit the EXIF data.
If not… I believe Google’s Picasa might do the job, but I’m not 100% sure.
The free and wonderful program Irfanview will let you edit and change all the info in there, comments, EXIF, etc. It’s dead easy. I think you can even do batch operations in the latest version.
There are several standards for embedding metadata information in an image file, including the IPTC standard that’s used in Photoshop files, as you mentioned. In fact, the JPEG standard supports embedding of the same IPTC metadata fields as Photoshop, as does TIFF. It’s just that not all programs that read and write JPEG files support IPTC metadata. A free Windows image viewer program that does is IrfanView; it’ll allow you to read and write pretty much the same metadata fields that Photoshop does. The page linked to above for the IPTC standard also lists a variety of programs that read/write IPTC metadata. Generally, IPTC metadata is supported as part of Photoshop (.PSD), TIFF (.tif), JPEG (.jpg), and PNG (.png) files, though in practice I don’t know of any image editing application that actually writes IPTC metadata into PNGs.
The EXIF metadata mentioned by ntucker is somewhat different. The EXIF metadata standard has to do primarily with communicating information about how a digital photograph was created; most digital cameras encode EXIF metadata into the images they create, but again only certain programs will display this information (though most of the image viewers/catalogers that are bundled with digital cameras will do it). Again, IrfanView is your friend here, and will display all of the EXIF metadata fields.
I deal with image databases, and associating metadata with images, for a living, and I’m quite aware that both of the above paragraphs oversimplify things somewhat; if you have more detailed questions or want amplification of anything here, let me know. I can ramble about this stuff for days.
Cool Can you please explain the practical difference between the two? I would think you could just use fields with different names to store different information… why do we need two completely separate metadata formats?
Well, the EXIF and IPTC links in my post above give a fair amount of information about the history of each, but essentially each focuses on a different type of information. The IPTC metadata standard was originally developed to provide a way of ensuring that the important information about wire service photos stayed with the photo when it was distributed digitally – caption, keywords, subject, photographer credit, date/time created, origin city/state/country, copyright info, etc. (Before digital photo transmission, the photo and info were each transmitted on what was essentially a fax machine, with the photo on one page and the related info on another). The EXIF standard was promulgated by manufacturers of digital photography equipment (primarily, though the standard provides for encoding metadata in audio files as well) to provide a means for encoding information about how the image was created – things like exposure, aperture, flash mode, program settings, make and model of camera, etc. There’s almost no overlap between the fields in the two standards: EXIF has an “image description” and a “user comment” field, while IPTC has a “caption” field and a few others that could be used for general free-form text, but otherwise there’re no fields that would typically serve the same purpose across the two standards. Most or all EXIF fields are treated as read-only by software programs that support displaying them, while all IPTC metadata fields are generally editable in programs that allow for any editing of IPTC metadata.
Adobe has made an effort to consolidate and expand the use of metadata on images with its XMP standard – basically, XMP offers a way of embedding IPTC, EXIF, and other metadata (including custom fields) in any image file (or any type of file, for that matter) using XML. If you have Photoshop CS, the File Info panels are your interface to this – the Camera Data 1 and Camera Data 2 panels contain the standard EXIF metadata, while the other standard panels contain IPTC metadata. There are tools available for creating custom panels to capture and display user-defined fields as well. But while every major player in the related software markets has declared its intention to support XMP (with the notable exception, AFAIK, of Microsoft), products that actually do anything useful with XMP-formatted metadata are pretty thin on the ground, outside of Adobe’s CS suite.
Can you please explain the practical difference between the two? I would think you could just use fields with different names to store different information… why do we need two completely separate metadata formats?