I love exiftool and am comfortable using it (on OSX).
But I am bemused by the variety of tags that are available and, despite much searching, can't see a "standard" set of tags to be used in labelling an archive of photos, mainly jpegs but some tiffs.
I want to store the following:
Date photo taken
Photographer
Caption
Keywords
Copyright
What are the best tags to use for these variables that will be picked up properly by different software?
I see several options that could be used for each of the above, except Keywords.
I would suggest using the MWG composite (http://www.exiftool.org/TagNames/MWG.html) tags for best compatibility. These tags write the data to multiple tags so programs can read whichever tags they use.
From your list,
| Date photo taken | MWG:DateTimeOriginal
Maybe MWG:CreateDate as well |
| Photographer | MWG:Creator |
| Caption | MWG:Description |
| Keywords | MWG:Keywords |
| Copyright | MWG:Copyright |
If you follow the link above, it will tell you what tags are written and are basically equivalent.
There are other options for
Keywords.
Subject is the XMP version of
Keywords and there is also
HierarchicalSubject for keeping keywords in an Hierarchy. For example if you have a tag for you brother John Smith, you could use HierarchicalSubject like this People->Family->John Smith and the actually tag would be written with pipe characters in between
People|Family|John Smith. Adobe products use this.
With regards to
MWG:DateTimeOriginal and
MWG:CreateDate, they are similar, often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference.
DateTimeOriginal CreateDate is when the digital file was created.
CreateDate DateTimeOriginal is for when the image was created. For digital images created by modern cameras, these should be exactly the same. But if, for example, you scan in an old film photo, the
DateTimeOriginal CreateDate would be the day of the scan and the
CreateDate DateTimeOriginal would be the day the image was actually taken. But that's being needlessly picky and hardly anyone outside a professional archivist is going to worry about it.
For more information (than you even want to know), you can check out the Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata pdf (http://www.metadataworkinggroup.org/pdf/mwg_guidance.pdf) and the IPTC Photo Metadata.pdf (https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata-201007.pdf). They're dry and technical reads, but they help make stuff clear.
Edit: correction as pointed out by johnrellis
QuoteDateTimeOriginal is when the digital file was created. CreateDate is for when the image was created. For digital images created by modern cameras, these should be exactly the same. But if, for example, you scan in an old film photo, the DateTimeOriginal would be the day of the scan and the CreateDate would be the day the image was actually taken.
I think you had a thinko and reversed the meanings. According to the Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata (page 37),
Quote
- Date/time original specifies when a photo was taken
- Date/time digitized specifies when an image was digitized
(I stumbled upon this thread looking for something else but wanted to correct it for future readers.)