Microsoft free tool does image metadata

Huh? you say. Let me rephrase.

Information about digital photos is stored in the photos themselves, and there are two kinds. One is EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format), which consists of various camera settings — aperture, shutter speed, lens, etc.

The other is IPTC (named for the International Press Telecommunications Council). It allows the photographer to add a title, caption, keywords, etc. Adobe’s XMP metadata format incorporates IPTC.

Anyway.

The important thing is that these are standards. If you use software that lets you tag or caption images without using a standard, and you ever give up that software, you’re screwed. But if you use EXIF and IPTC data, you’re set for the long haul. Lots of software supports both. (I’ve written about this before.)

I use a wonderful program called Pixvue to quickly edit my photos’ IPTC info — adding titles and captions, mostly. That’s because Windows itself didn’t support it. If you right-clicked an image and messed with the Properties dialog, you were messing with proprietary Windows stuff, not standard IPTC.

But now, finally, Microsoft has released a free tool that lets you view and edit EXIF and IPTC info in your digital images. Whoopee! You can get it from Microsoft, or you can get it right here.

More info from Microsoft here.

If you have more than a handful of photos, you really need to add IPTC data to them, and this is an easy and standard way to do it.