March 3, 2005
11:48 PM
11:48 PM
Comments/keywords/tags in EXIF?
So here's a gripe – why is it that despite the growing popularity of applications like iPhoto to manage one's photo library, there seem to be no 'keyword' or 'description' tags in the EXIF metadata for photographs? Or am I missing something?
There aren't a lot of options in Exif 2.1 - maybe DCF (proposed standard) will have better tagging, but I haven't seen it.
Basically, in Exif, you could use tag 0x8769 (ExifOffset) to mark your way up to a SubIFD field with the tag of 0x9286, which is the 'UserComment' field, whose contents are undefined text data (in ASCII, JIS, or Unicode).
Unfortunately, this isn't as nice as, say, being able to define arbitrary fields and field names, and then being able to search across only specific fields. All your meta data would go into the 'UserComment' field, and you would only be able to search that, which has the potential for making search results over-broad.