I am in the process of examining how photo collections maintained by campus
units can be incorporated into the library's repository. In all cases that
I've had to deal with so far, they're just using the file system -- i.e.
traversing folders that arrange images thematically to file names that
indicate the content.

Each of these collections contains many thousands of images. This means
that it's a hassle for them to find images, but also that there's no way
library staff alone will be able to handle all the metadata creation.

I'd like to use something slick like picasa to help them out (facial
recognition is an especially big deal for us). But I'm finding the metadata
to be both minimalist and clunky to work with so I wanted a reality check
to see if I'm not doing this the dumb way. Things I've noticed:


   1. Picasa appears to store info in xmp rather than exif which is great
   given the limitations of exif. However, I haven't yet found a way to use
   more than a couple fields. The caption shows up in a description field, and
   they tag show up in subjects. But aside from that, I'm at a loss of how to
   populate other DC fields through the interface.

   2. Facial recognition metadata doesn't show up in xmp at all. However, I
   can get that by parsing .picasa.ini and contacts.xml (clunky, but doable).
   I'm kind of tempted to tell people to go into albums and batch tag the
   people albums since it's going to be fun explaining how to locate these
   hidden files.

My real question is whether anyone has come up with a really good way to
assign metadata to thousands of photos, preferably in batch fashion? Thanks,

kyle