Kyle,
Take a look at what the Embedded Metadata Working Group from the VRA (Visual Resources Association) has done with developing a way to embed and export / import descriptive metadata that can be reused in discovery systems as well as being resident in the files, that can assist with file management.

http://metadatadeluxe.pbworks.com/w/page/20792238/FrontPage

Kari Smith
Digital Archivist, MIT Libraries
Formerly, Head, Visual Resources, Univ. Michigan History of Art department

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kyle Banerjee
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 2:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Easiest way to tag thousands of images

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