Many years ago, I stopped tagging my photos with short (one-word) tags. Either the tools only allowed a limited number of tags, or they stored the tags in a separate database rather than in the photo file itself, or one of a number of other problems that I forget now.

This was the peak-tagging time: delic.io.us was the thing. Organisations were trying to standardise tag formats, and how to tag various types of data. Think IPTC, Dublin Core, XMP, Meta Content Framework, Resource Description Framework, etc.

Google was still a friendly startup that had revolutionised searching. I think everyone realised that tagging was limited, and full-text search was the real thing. Operating systems started scanning filesystems looking for tags, and indexing text, including descriptive text metadata within photos. Application were adding support for these search databases.

My idea was rather than adding a plethora of one-word tags, I would write a short text description in the format

  • <who> is <where> doing <what> on <occasion>

To save time, I would usually add the same description to a groups of photos: a whole week of holiday pictures, all of the birthday-party snaps, etc.

Later, I might go back and rate the nicest photos 3, 4 or 5 stars, and add more detail to the description.

My assumption was that eventually the photo management tools would catch up and let me search; that assumption is now true, and my

However, I did not anticipate the growing and changing standards, and the way different tools implemented them.

There are mutliple ways of storing metadata within a photo file: Exif tag, XMP block, <something else that escapes me now>. Each of these has metadata items intended to describe the photo based on the ideas of ‘Title’, ‘Description’ and ‘Comment’, but with different names and slightly different meaning. Different tools can read some subset of these; they can write a smaller subset of those they can read. They use the descriptive text instead of file name.

I think the idea of ‘Title’, ‘Description’ and ‘Comment’ is valid

  • ‘Title’ is an arbitrary name for the picture
  • ‘Caption’
  • ‘Subject’
  • ‘Description’ is a text description of the content of the picture
  • ‘Comment’

I now need a tool that can

  • read tags from any of the metadata descriptive fields
  • synchronise the content of equivalent tags from different standards, by offering to merge them, or selecting one and overwriting the others
  • write the new content to my chosen subset of fields