Question of Image EXIF Data

Itch

Group:

Does it make sense to put Key Words/Tags within the metadata/Exif of an image? Would this help on search engine queries? Also all of my image file names are YYYMMDD on SmugMug. Should I change their names to include a Keyword? I'm just looking for ways to improve findability on the Web.

rainforest1155

If you add a caption / keywords as part of the IPTC or XMP metadata, the caption and keywords would be automatically imported to SmugMug when you upload the photo. That way you wouldn't have to add the caption / keywords within SmugMug.

If you have photos that you captioned and keyworded within SmugMug, there would be no search benefit of adding the caption / keyword to the file and then upload it again. So there's no need to do that.

jfriend

rainforest1155 wrote: »

If you add a caption / keywords as part of the IPTC or XMP metadata, the caption and keywords would be automatically imported to SmugMug when you upload the photo. That way you wouldn't have to add the caption / keywords within SmugMug.

If you have photos that you captioned and keyworded within SmugMug, there would be no search benefit of adding the caption / keyword to the file and then upload it again. So there's no need to do that.

I think what the Itch is asking is whether Google will see stuff you put in the EXIF data when indexing images on the Smugmug site. There are three parts to that question:

1) Does Google pay attention to EXIF stuff when indexing images and use it to enhance how they index your images?
2) Does Smugmug offer the appropriate EXIF fields in the images that Google sees on your smugmug site so that Google could actually see that metadata on the images?
3) If the answer to #1 is yes, then does that give you improved search relevance compared to only filling in caption/description field in Smugmug?

rainforest1155

I can't say if Google pays attention to that, but if they want, they can index EXIF info for photos as well. Here's an example of what's available for this photo:
https://img.skitch.com/20120816-g6pe97a8gkpsx1aqg8gmxbbme2.jpg

To see what search engines can see, you can get a user agent switcher for most browsers that allow you to set your user agent to Googlebot or another search crawler.