Metadata Practices for Consumer Photos

storage devices today, combined with the rapid expansion of broadband Internet connectivity, has given consumers more control over their digital photo collections than ever before. There’s virtually no limit to the amount of digital images we can keep and store on our PCs. As a result, the emerging challenge is searching through these digital image collections. With no information about the image content, the only effective search method is browsing through numerous folders to find the right photo. Digital image metadata plays a crucial role in managing digital image repositories. (See the “Defining Metadata” sidebar for a full definition.) It lets us catalog and maintain large image collections as well as search for and find relevant information. Moreover, describing a digital image with defined metadata schemes lets multiple systems with different platforms and interfaces access and process image metadata. Metadata’s wide use in commercial, academic, and educational domains as well as on the Web has propelled the development of new standards for digital image data schemes. The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association has proposed the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) as a standard for storing administrative metadata in digital image files during acquisition. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has developed a standard for storing descriptive metadata information within digital images. These metadata schemas, as well as other emerging standards, provide a standard format for creating, processing, and exchanging digital image metadata and enable image management, analysis, indexing, and search applications.