"Country" tag -- place photographed or place photographed from?

[calberga]

I was recently on a river cruise on the Danube.  I have photographs taken from the ship while sailing between Serbia and Romania.  Should the images be tagged with the country photographed (to one side of the ship or the other), or with my best guess as to which side of the mid-stream boarder they were taken from?

This would be analogous to tagging a photograph of the Horseshoe Falls (Niagra) which is in Canada from the US side of the gorge.  I'm not sure what to do in that case either!

[StarGeek]

I actually just read about this recently.  In the IPTC Photo Metadata pdf, it says:

Country (legacy)

Full name of the country the content is focussing on -- either the country shown in visual media or referenced in text or audio media. This element is at the top/first level of a top-down geographical hierarchy. The full name should be expressed as a verbal name and not as a code, a code should go to the element "CountryCode"

It goes on to say

This is a detail of a location with blurred semantics as it does not clearly indicate whether it is the location in the image or the location the photo was taken - which can be different. Two more concise properties are available in IPTC Extension with Location Created and Location Shown in the Image.

The LocationCreated and LocationShown tags are structured tags, though, and a bit more complicated for casual use.  Not to mention whether the programs you use can even read those tags.

When it comes down to it, do what you want to do.  It's your data, what's important is that you understand how it's setup.

[calberga]

Thank you very much.  I did a quick search but missed the passage you cite.  Now to figure out which way I was facing for a few of the pictures!