Picasa upgrade — finally, IPTC support

I really like Google’s Picasa — it’s a terrific tool for editing and browsing your photos. It’s “basic” editing functions are all I need 99 percent of the time; Photoshop only comes in when I need to edit part of an image. When it comes to adjusting the lighting, sharpness, and so on, Picasa does the trick.

What’s cool about Picasa (and other program such as Adobe Lightroom) is that they don’t mess with your original image. You tweak the heck out of each picture, then you export them for print, for the Web, for e-mail, etc. The original is untouched; Picasa keeps a record of the changes it made. Worst-case scenario, you lose the tweaks but not your originals. And you can always go back and re-tweak.

But Picasa had a fatal flaw. It didn’t support IPTC — the International Press Telecommunications Council’s standard for image metadata. (It is now merged into the XMP standard, but that’s another story.)

Many, many programs support IPTC data. It allows you to embed information such as title, caption, keyboard, photographer, location, etc., inside the photo itself. That means that, as long as you have the image, you have all that data. Much better than storing info about your images in a separate database, the way image organizers like ACDSee do.

Anyway, I rely heavily on IPTC. If my photo has a caption, it’s an IPTC caption. For example, my site’s photo albums use Zenphoto for the back end, and one of the things Zenphoto does is pull the relevant IPTC data out of each image and display it as a caption. And if I ever switch to other software, whatever it is will also have access to the same captions and other info. I’m not married to a particular program.

Anyway, I found that I would use Picasa to crop and tweak a photo, but then I’d have to give the image a name, caption, and keywords using

something else — either Photoshop or Pixvue (a terrific little program that basically reads and writes IPTC data). It wasn’t a bad system, but it was annoying to have to use two programs for it. Picasa should support IPTC!

And now it does. The new version of Picasa (3.0, still beta) lets you enter captions the same way as Picasa 2, but this time that caption is stored as IPTC data instead of in Picasa’s database. Yay!

Here’s how it works. Here’s a caption in Picasa:

And here’s what you see in Photoshop:

And in PixVue:

And, finally, on his Web site:

Ain’t metadata cool?

Update: Big downer. Picasa doesn’t support IPTC titles. Only captions. So if I want to add a title (as I did in this picture), I still have to use a separate app. Grr.