Wrangling Photo Metadata

[r.e.]

Moving this to a new thread from where the discussion started...

The screen capture below shows a draft IPTC template that was made in Photo Mechanic (https://home.camerabits.com). It's revised from a version posted yesterday in another thread.

For me, this is a big improvement over what's available in Capture One, which I use for image processing, and over the full IPTC template that comes with Photo Mechanic. The IPTC understandably tries to cover the needs of all photographers, everybody from a photojournalist covering the invasion of Ukraine to a sports photographer covering the New York Yankees. The result is a growing list of IPTC fields, some of them quite specialised. For example, there's an IPTC field designed to be used if the identity of the photographer has to be hidden for security reasons.

In addition, the IPTC has decided that camera manufacturers should be in full charge of recording all camera data. This is why there are no IPTC fields for such things as camera, lens, taking focal length and exposure. The camera manufacturers, via software in their digital cameras, have agreed to record this data in EXIF fields. Analogue photographers can also record this information in EXIF fields, but they need Phil Harvey's ExifTool (https://exiftool.org) or similar, and a willingness to use a Terminal App instead of a graphical user interface, to do it. Absent that, they need somewhere to enter this information manually.

The IPTC template below pares way back on the number of possible IPTC fields, and repurposes seven of the discarded fields to create fields for camera, lens, exposure and development information. It also includes the IPTC's latest iteration of location fields, which makes it possible to distinguish between the location of the camera and the location of the subject. The example in the template records that the photograph was shot from Brooklyn, but that the subject is Manhattan on the other side of the East River.

In the template, clicking on a box with an upside-down triangle opens a dropdown menu. If one has created the relevant data, the menu can be used to populate a field with the click of a mouse. In Photo Mechanic, the world globe symbols in the location fields trigger reverse geocoding. Click on the globe and it will turn the lat/long recorded in your digital camera into the field's common name.

My understanding is that Photo Mechanic is used by most media organisations and photojournalists to import their photographs, cull them and input metadata. Using Photo Mechanic isn't the only way to customise an IPTC template, but it's a convenient method, and the app's substantive features are quite powerful.

That said, another participant in this forum, @PatrickMarq, uses ExifTool and a MySQL database to accomplish the same thing for his own analogue large format photographs (Patrick's website (https://www.marquetecken.be)). He has graciously offered to show me how his method works this week. Patrick's posts in the thread where this discussion started begin at https://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?169382-What-will-happen-to-your-negatives-in-quot-the-end-quot&p=1650405&viewfull=1#post1650405

I realise, of course, that some people prefer to use pen and notebook. Cool. Some of my photos are going to a couple of historical societies, and I need to turn over the photos in digital form accompanied by digital, searchable information about their content.

IPTC Draft Template
I've heightened the contrast, etc. in an effort to make this screen capture, downsized to about 70kb when uploaded to the forum, easier to read.

228975

[r.e.]

This screen capture shows how the drop-down menus work. This can be done for most of the fields. It saves time, and for search purposes provides consistency of terminology and spelling.

228988


I've used Mac TextEdit to make a plaintext file for each field, which is then imported into Photo Mechanic. In Windows, I'd use something like Notepad++. With plaintext, there's no text formatting to do. It's the most basic way to create a text file on a computer.

This is the plaintext (.txt) file that I made for the Camera drop-down menu shown in the screen capture above. Doesn't get any simpler:

228989

[r.e.]

@PatrickMarq has provided me with a wealth of information on the catalogue system that he's devised for his photographs. It's truly impressive, and I'm considering what aspects of it I could adopt.

Meanwhile, the iteration below of my little IPTC template is close to final. Because of the drop-down menus (see post just above), most of the fields in the template can be populated with a mouse click.

I've added a "Camera's Lat/Long" field to the location fields in the upper right. By snapping an iPhone photo as part of making an analogue photo, I have the lat/long for analogue as well as digital photos and can include it in the metadata. Lat/long is also available via Maps, Compass and Siri, but simply triggering the phone's camera creates a record that can be consulted and input later.

The folks at Photo Mechanic tell me that the location fields below the Camera Lat/Long field can't be altered, presumably due to the reverse geocoding function (see post #1). "Location ID" stands for "Location Identifier", a rather technical feature that I probably won't use. If I can't delete the field, I may use it for less esoteric kinds of Location Identifiers, such as neighbourhood names and street addresses :)

This is not a money-making exercise. The "permission to use the photo" part of the template will contain terms that encourage people to use the photos.

For me, this is a significant improvement over using Capture One for metadata and search.


229034

[r.e.]

Between what @PatrickMarq has shown me and what I've seen of Phil Harvey's ExifTool, I'm confident that ExifTool can duplicate what's in the IPTC template above. The advantage, apart from the fact that ExifTool is free, is that it wouldn't be necessary to repurpose IPTC data fields. All of the data, including the analogue camera data, would be where an outside viewer of the data expects it to be. However, if the audience is restricted to people who use a Linux, Mac or Windows terminal, there isn't a lot of point in doing this. The question is how much of the data popular graphical interface apps, such as Lightroom and Capture One, would present to a user.

I'm inclined to find the answer to that question sometime in the next week. I don't think that it's necessary to get too deep into ExifTool. Use ExifTool to attach select data to a photograph, and see what Capture One, which I have, shows about that data. I'd also like to know how faithfully Photo Mechanic processes data that's been input via ExifTool.

[Oren Grad]

Since nobody else has responded yet, I just want to jump in for a moment to thank you for launching this thread and for the information you've posted so far. I'm in the process of revisiting how I'm going to deal with this for my own work, but I'm juggling that against some other responsibilities - hope to have a bit more to say before too much longer.

[PatrickMarq]

Between what @PatrickMarq has shown me and what I've seen of Phil Harvey's ExifTool, I'm confident that ExifTool can duplicate what's in the IPTC template above. The advantage, apart from the fact that ExifTool is free, is that it wouldn't be necessary to repurpose IPTC data fields. All of the data, including the analogue camera data, would be where an outside viewer of the data expects it to be. However, if the audience is restricted to people who use a Linux, Mac or Windows terminal, there isn't a lot of point in doing this. The question is how much of the data popular graphical interface apps, such as Lightroom and Capture One, would present to a user.

I'm inclined to find the answer to that question sometime in the next week. I don't think that it's necessary to get too deep into ExifTool. Use ExifTool to attach select data to a photograph, and see what Capture One, which I have, shows about that data. I'd also like to know how faithfully Photo Mechanic processes data that's been input via ExifTool.

Some remarks on my side:
It’s not really needed to use the command line, if you have the exif command in a file. You have always an scheduler on all the OS. This scheduler can execute the file without any user interaction.
About the display of the EXIF fields, all the fields I uses at this time are visible in Lightroom and should visible in other programs as wel these are standaard.

At the end it’s quite easy put dummy exif data in your software, export with exif data and check with exiftool where to put it.

Gr
Patrick

[r.e.]

Some remarks on my side:
It’s not really needed to use the command line, if you have the exif command in a file. You have always an scheduler on all the OS. This scheduler can execute the file without any user interaction.

Good point, also known as an operating system's Cron Utility. Also, the head of marketing for Photo Mechanic tells me that he uses Mac Automator, which is a Macro Utility, to input analogue data into Photo Mechanic's IPTC Template.

There's also at least one Graphical User Interface for ExifTool, but I'm happy to use Mac Terminal and I haven't tried using it. ExifToolGUI is available on GitHub for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Good to know that all of the data that Patrick is inputting with ExifTool appears in Lightroom.

[PatrickMarq]

When playing around with Negative Lab Pro, I found out that this plug-in writes (for me unwanted ) exif data into the tiff file.
while examening this and updating the exiftool , I saw that there are 'new' fiields that possible can be populated.


These tags belong to the ExifTool XMP-exif family 1 group.
File Source: 1 = Film Scanner
2 = Reflection Print Scanner
3 = Digital Camera
Values integer is the output !, text is the input


This I have not found yet
Film Brand -> Portra
Film Type -> Color Negative
Film Vendor -> Kodak


At this time i'n not able to put the film stuff information into the fields, but perhaps with the exiftoom forum I may able to do this.

After running older images trough exiftool it seems that the Fields come probably from Negative Lab Pro, going to shed my light there.

Keep you all informed.

[PatrickMarq]

After feedback from Nate at Negative Lab Pro, it's not the software that create this.

So I have done several test with Silverfast:

16bit positive scan - empty
exiftool -s /Volumes/G-DRIVE\ 4TB/FOTO\'S/_TEMP_SCANS/Schelp\ -\ TIFF16\ -\ ITPC.tif | grep Film

32bit positive HDRi scan - files are here but empty
exiftool -s /Volumes/G-DRIVE\ 4TB/FOTO\'S/_TEMP_SCANS/Schelp\ -\ TIFF32HRdri-\ ITPC.tif | grep Film
FilmSource :
FilmVendor :
FilmBrand :
FilmType :

Negafix !! - It seems That the data is coming from the Negafix
exiftool -s /Volumes/G-DRIVE\ 4TB/FOTO\'S/_TEMP_SCANS/Schelp\ -\ Negafix.tif | grep Film
FilmSource :
FilmVendor : Ilford
FilmBrand : Delta
FilmType : 100

I have now reachout to Silverfast

[r.e.]

After spending more time looking at options than I care to admit, I've decided that upgrading from Photo Mechanic 6 to Photo Mechanic Plus will meet my metadata needs for the foreseeable future. It's the fastest, easiest way to achieve my objective. A new license for PM Plus is US$229, and my upgrade from PM 6 cost $90. Camera Bits, which makes this software, does not use the subscription model, at least not yet, and the company's history suggests it will be some time before it pushes its users for a paid upgrade. Camera Bits also does an unusually good job on support, and is an active participant in its user forum.

Photographers have used Photo Mechanic for 25 years to import photographs, separate the wheat from the chaff and apply metadata before sending their images off to a photo editor like Photoshop/Lightroom or Capture One. PM Plus, launched in October 2020, adds a database (catalogue functionality) that, for search, can replace the databases that Lightroom, via Catalogues, and Capture One, via Catalogues and Sessions, offer. From my perspective, the main function of these databases, apart from recording edits, is to facilitate finding photographs. PM 6 does a better job than my photo editor when it comes to handling the metadata that's needed for search, and I've concluded that PM Plus makes searching easier. I just find that PM is both more powerful and more user-friendly.

I should add that I've discovered in the last few days that there are a few apps that offer a graphic user interface to input and edit EXIF data. I've tried one for Mac called MetaImage (https://neededapps.com/metaimage/), and I think that it's a solid option. No doubt there are Windows equivalents.

[r.e.]

Some additional comments about Photo Mechanic...

The typical user of PM uses digital cameras to shoot large numbers of photographs of an event and wants to process them fast. I come from an analogue background and continue to shoot film. When using a digital camera, I'm pretty selective about tripping the shutter. When I was first considering PM 6, I wondered whether it was useful for someone who doesn't photograph political demonstrations, football games, rock concerts or weddings, and who doesn't make 2,000-3,000 photographs at a single event. David Bergman has a video for Adorama on YouTube in which he talks about using PM to manage 5,000 photographs that he shot for country music star Luke Combs at an outdoor concert. It's a useful video about PM, but 5,000 photos for one show? To me, that's just mind boggling :) Unlike some stock photographers who use PM, I also don't have a backlist consisting of hundreds of thousands of photographs.

I decided to purchase the standard version of PM, currently PM 6, even though I'm not the kind of photographer that PM is principally designed for. I did so because PM does a better job of "Digital Asset Management" than Lightroom, which I was using at the time, and Capture One, which I use now. I like how it handles import and selection, and it provides significantly more control when it comes to attaching information to photographs, which in turn makes it easier to find them and understand their context and content.

I was a hard sell on PM Plus. I had reservations about using Capture One databases (Catalogues or Sessions) for editing, and a separate PM database for metadata and search. However, I'm satisfied that this can be set up so that the increase in computer storage required is marginal. On the upside, PM Plus provides more control over search. One advantage is that it can be set up to include, in searches, much more EXIF camera or scanner data.* Using either Phil Harvey's Exiftool or a graphical user interface app such as MetaImage (see post just above), it's possible to record this information for analogue photographs without repurposing IPTC fields (see the "How This Photograph Was Made" section in the screen capture attached to post #3). In PM, repurposing IPTC fields is easy enough to do (it isn't possible in Capture One or Lightroom), but I'd just as soon avoid it. Note also that PM Plus search, unlike Lightroom and Capture One search, is not restricted to the four corners of what's in a Lightroom Catalogue or Capture One Catalogue or Session. If one wants, PM Plus can search across database containers.

The final observation that I should make is that a photograph that has been processed in Lightroom or Capture One doesn't automatically appear in its processed form in PM. PM shows the original image, not the processed image, unless one exports one's processed images into PM. I've decided that this is acceptable. Some people may even consider it desirable. Linking from an original image in PM to its processed counterpart in Capture One or Lightroom takes a mouse click.

What @PatrickMarq is doing addresses all of these issues, but his solution is not commercially available and requires quite a bit of knowledge about computer coding to pull off. Off the shelf, PM is the best solution that I've come across.

* I discovered this a few days ago courtesy a YouTube video by a fellow named Carl Seibert called Working with Exif data in Photo Mechanic Plus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSriOrNbY9U). Mr. Seibert is a former newspaper photo editor who covers, in blog posts and YouTube videos, PM features that can be obscure in the app's documentation and are not covered in PM YouTube tutorials. The latter are pretty broad brush. Camera Bits/PM has a lackadaisical, almost disengaged, approach to social media, and doesn't have an outreach, training counterpart to Adobe's Julieanne Kost or Phase One/Capture One's David Grover. Seibert's videos can be heavy going if one doesn't share his keen interest in the intricacies of metadata, but he knows what he's talking about and I've found his videos helpful.