organize photos using IPTC

playernovis

I was reading some posts, the most useful is this http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=35616&highlight=IPTC - thanks a lot !! I saved me a lot of time. :bow




I downloaded Microsoft Photo Info, it works great, but ... I still have some questions how to organize photos on my PC and later upload to SmugMug (I have a lot of snaps).




1. It's easy to add photo Title, Description and Keywords (exactly what I was looking for). If I understand it correctly Description and Keywords will be correctly imported to smugmug for each photo (Title is not imported if I'm not wrong).

How about Category and Category Description? What fields are the best? I currently have my photos organized by folders, is there any place for Category+Category Description in each JPEG IPTC?



2. what is the best approach for keywords? Some user put a year e.g. 2007 as keyword, some even put month or location in there. How gurus organize thousands of photos?




thank you
jiri

Richard

playernovis wrote:

1. It's easy to add photo Title, Description and Keywords (exactly what I was looking for). If I understand it correctly Description and Keywords will be correctly imported to smugmug for each photo (Title is not imported if I'm not wrong).

Yes, you are correct.

How about Category and Category Description? What fields are the best? I currently have my photos organized by folders, is there any place for Category+Category Description in each JPEG IPTC?

Yes, IPTC 2-editorial has category and supplemental category fields and the newer XMP IPTC core has intellectual genre. However, AFAIK, Smugmug ignores these fields. They could be useful to you, but only if the software you use to catalog your images is capable of searching on these fields.

2. what is the best approach for keywords? Some user put a year e.g. 2007 as keyword, some even put month or location in there. How gurus organize thousands of photos?

I'm not a guru, but I have spent a fair amount of time on cataloging my pics. You need to consider two things: how other people will find your pics through searches on Smugmug (and hence, the Web) and how you yourself will be able to find pics in your archive. All cataloging software should offer you the ability to filter searches by date range, so there is no need to put it in your keywords. Dates are part of the EXIF data that your camera produces and are found in the Jpgs, so there's no need for you to enter these data manually. Smugmug lets you search on date ranges as well, so they do not need to be included in keywords.

Location can be put in the IPTC metadata and any decent catalog program will be able to search on it. However, Smugmug does not pick location fields up automatically, so if you want others to search on it, you will need to enter location as a keyword on Smugmug. The bulk keyword edit function makes this fairly painless.

There is no "correct" way here, however. You should do your keywording in whatever way makes it easiest for you to find the pics you're looking for.

Hope this helps.

Regards.

claudermilk

playernovis wrote:

I downloaded Microsoft Photo Info, it works great, but ... I still have some questions how to organize photos on my PC and later upload to SmugMug (I have a lot of snaps).

Actually, it doesn't. That utility is known to be buggy and trashes files. I would strongly suggest ditching it and finding another utility to edit your metadata.

Now, on the the questions.

For organizing on the drive, I've found a date-based method works well. My own files are organized under year/yearmonth/yearmonthday--event.

Smugmug imports the Captions and Keywords fields and parses those to show on your page and be searchable. The original files still have all the rest of the IPTC retained, just not searchable.

For keywording, I generall put ones that describe what's in the photo. For location, I use the location fields & those are more for my own reference than anything else; if it is important to the image, I'd add that to the Keywords field.

playernovis

thank you for really detail responses, it really helps a lot

my plan is to keep local copy of my photos only for backup purposes, I want to use SmugMug for viewing. Before I push all photos to SmugMug I'm trying to organize them a bit so my local copy desription ties to what I have on SmugMug. Currenly I have folders organized by YEAR-CATEGORY


claudermilk what tool do you recommend? I really want it only for one-time bulk (or semi-bulk is this a word?) changes. I would like some free solulion of possible.


thank you again for your help
jiri

BradfordBenn

I personally found that Adobe Lightroom does this task really well, at least for my use. I can edit the information quickly and easily, in addition it has a good way to do the sorting and searching.

claudermilk

I primarily use the IPTC editor within IMatch (and some scripts to automate things as well--that's a whole other can of worms). Another option would be BreezeBrowser. I'd also look at ExifTool and ExifTool GUI --while I haven't used the GUI yet (zip file's on my drive waiting for me to get to it), the base utility it's fronting is the most comprehensive, solid utility for working with metadata available.

playernovis

I was plying with iTag. It's really nice and easy to use. ExifTool GUI looks really nice and does even more, I will give it a try.

thanks again for all your tips
jiri