What is relationship between IPTC and EXIF? How used by image cataloging systems?

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Father Kodak - 24 Dec 2005 05:03 GMT

How are these two linked? I'm also interested in definitive reference
sources for each of these.

Also, I'm interested in learning about image cataloging systems that
read/write/modify EXIF or IPTC data.

I'm posting to rec.photo.equipment.35mm because I assume that even
film-based photography can utilitize these data formats? Yes? No?

Thank you.

Father Kodak

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Joe Makowiec - 24 Dec 2005 11:45 GMT

> How are these two linked? I'm also interested in definitive reference
> sources for each of these.

As Far As I Know, other than that both are embedded in image files, there
is no link between the two. Certainly a single image can have both.

http://www.iptc.org/

http://www.exif.org/
http://www.jeita.or.jp/english/standard/html/1_4.htm

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Joe Makowiec
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David Dyer-Bennet - 24 Dec 2005 17:53 GMT

> How are these two linked? I'm also interested in definitive reference
> sources for each of these.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> I'm posting to rec.photo.equipment.35mm because I assume that even
> film-based photography can utilitize these data formats? Yes? No?

Yes, definitely.

Although many of the EXIF fields are really specific to digital
photography, and the ones that aren't (like date and time) are
duplicated in IPTC. However, if you have the information, you could
certainly put aperture and exposure information for film photos into
EXIF fields.

Thumbs Plus (www.cerious.com) has quite a good IPTC editor application
embedded. Nothing to edit EXIF, though.

Irfanview, the wonderful free viewer, also has an adequate IPTC
editor, but also doesn't edit EXIF.

Exifer says it edits exif, but mostly it copies exif from image to
image, it doesn't seem to offer much ability to change individual
fields, that I could find.

There's a PERL library for IPTC and one for EXIF (or one for both,
maybe; probably many exist, and I forget what I'm using), so you can
script complex changes if you need to.

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Steve Berger - 24 Dec 2005 19:11 GMT

You can also use a program called photo mechanic.

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Brion K. Lienhart - 26 Dec 2005 06:41 GMT

> Although many of the EXIF fields are really specific to digital
> photography, and the ones that aren't (like date and time) are
> duplicated in IPTC. However, if you have the information, you could
> certainly put aperture and exposure information for film photos into
> EXIF fields.

When I use a film lab to develop the APS film from my Minolta S-100, and
have it scanned to CD, they also put in the exposure info, etc that the
high end APS cameras record onto the cassette. It all ends up as EXIF
attached to the JPEGs.

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Paul Furman - 26 Dec 2005 16:13 GMT

IPTC is intended for journalism photography to identify the
photographer, date and location. EXIF is mostly for digital camera data.
The specifications for these are easily messed up so be careful editing
with freeware & cheezy programs, I found photoshop to be the most
reliable although not convenient. Even then some of the info like ISO on
a Nikon D70 is kept in a proprietary 'makernote' section and lost when
edited in PS. I found these are not the best place to store information
because of the compatibility problems and it's so easy to save a version
without that data like for web versions and in that case the full EXIF
makes the files rather larger than necessary.

My solution is plain text files in the same folders with the file name
and a .TXT extension. That is foolproof and easily adapted or
customized/automated. I use PHP scripts to automate editing as a dynamic
web page. Mostly I just add annotation but it would also be nice to
extract the basic camera shooting data. I simply keep original jpegs or
raw for the record.

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