General metadata guide

[BogdanH]

I believe, Exiftool users are somehow more involved into metadata, than those, who "only" tag their photos. Mainly, because usage of Exiftool forces us to learn at least basic things. And second, when entering into Exiftool pages, there's all info one can need and for many, more than one can consume.
Most photographers tag their photos by using either their preffered image editor or some catalog software. By doing this, they don't care much where data has been written or what tags has been used. I.e. when they see "Artist", "Creator" ("Photographer", "Author", etc.) field, they know what to write there. The confusion starts, when they later look after metadata by using another metadata viewer. They might discover, that their name apears in "By-line"(?), while "Artist" field is empty.

Ok, Exiftool forces us to be disciplined to some degree. But, because of various "standards" and to be as user friendly as possible (and flexible), even Exiftool can add to confusion. Let's say, we write:
-exiftool -city=Venice photo.jpg
-it's obvious what we try to accomplish here. But, if we open such file in another photo tool, it might happen that we see field City blank there! -because only Xmp data has been read by that tool. Now, because we think, City tag doesn't exist yet, we might decide to tag it with tool we are using right now. We decide to use original (italian) name and write "Venezia" into City field there. You allready know what I am up to.. this time, when executing:
-exiftool -city photo.jpg
-we will get "Venezia" as result (this time, everything went fine, we think). Well, depends... because some third tool might be more precise when showing metadata, like using Exiftool having "-a" option:
-exiftool -a -city photo.jpg
-this time we get both: Venice and Venezia!
Most Exiftool users know what's all about, but for others, it might look weird (how to delete particular one? etc). And I've touched only a single tag here -a tag, where one would think, there's no explanation needed for it (as it's name suggest).

Why I'm writting this (finally) is: I believe, there should be some "General metadata guide" somewhere, which would deal with cases like above.
We can't expect Phil doing this, as I believe, he's busy enough. I'm very sure, that if someone would be ready to write about, Phil would embed that into his pages. Or, if some good "How to manage metadata" writting allready exist somewhere, it would be usefull to have a link from Exiftool main page.
Well... it's just an idea.. they come and go.

Bogdan

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Bogdan,

I have ignored this topic for years because I have no control over how other applications handle metadata.  But recently I have been having more users with problems like this.  And now since the MWG recommendations are starting to take effect, I think it is time I added something to the documentation about this.  I will certainly add a FAQ entry, and refer to it from a number of points in the documentation.

I like the idea of a metadata guide as you suggest, I fear that if it is comprehensive enough to answer address all of the subtleties that exist it will be so long that nobody but you and me reads it.  But if someone wants to attempt it, please feel free to give it a try and I'll help where I can.

- Phil

[BogdanH]

Hi Phil,

I'm glad to see, I'm not the only who "noticed" situation as it is. And I really think you shouldn't feel obliged to explain how to manage metadata (as it wouldn't be enough helping us to solve resulting troubles).

Being "general" and "guide", it cannot and shouldn't try to address every situation possible. After reading some other forums, I have an impression, that users tend to populate every possible tag field they see in some application (at least this happens when they start to deal with metadata). But after a while, they discover that some of the tags (many actually) can be left blank and finally, they try to get some order in the "jungle".
IMO, what is needed to be writen about is, to guide how to be a "minimalist" in first place, i.e: what tags are "worth" to be populated, what is expected to be written in particular tag, how/where to avoid writting the same things twice (or more), etc. Thinking again, I believe, I'm talking about only ten tags here -yes, I am minimalist 
Well, in general, I have an idea how it should look alike... too bad my English grammar is very limited, otherwise I wouldn't hesitate to try.
I don't know how many "regular" visitors are here.. maybe someone will jump in.

Bogdan

[Phil Harvey]

Being "general" and "guide", it cannot and shouldn't try to address every situation possible.

It's a great idea in theory, but I'm not sure this is possible.  There are so many special cases in handling metadata that it may not be possible to come up with a useful set of general rules.  But it could be that I am looking at the problem too closely since I deal with these details all the time.  Someone with a more general view may have some helpful ideas here.

- Phil