Source: Digital Photography Review

Metadata is defined as “data about data.”  It’s computerese for both a dictionary of definitions about data, as well as the definition of data itself.  The term is more commonly used in large data installations called data marts and data warehouses, and is very important in data mining.

In everyday language, a metadata defines both the database and its elements, or a spreadsheet and its columns, and how these relate to another spreadsheet with different columns, and to another and to another.  And a data warehouse is a large repository of related data, of which a subset is called a data mart.  And data mining is the process of getting specific information from the mountain of data.

At this point, it’s all technospeak.  In real terms, this is the problem of anyone with a digital camera.  The source of the problem is the ease of taking pictures.  With this ease of use, comes lots of pictures.  With lots of pictures, it sometimes takes a lot of effort and time collating the information:  Where was the picture taken? What is the subject or topic or occasion? How was the picture taken?  What camera, lens, lighting and film settings were used?

A regular guy who’s trigger happy with his single camera would soon find out that he’s deep into this kind of problem.  We multiply this complexity by the number of manufacturers of digital photography devices and software and we now have the beginnings of chaos: every bit of information has to be sorted, collated and tagged manually.

Last year, the Metadata Working Group was formed to address this issue.  The Metadata Working Group is an alliance composed of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony and aims to standardize metadata embedded in digital pictures.  If you have a photo stored in your computer, check out its properties and the list you see is the metadata as defined by the camera manufacturer. If you edited the picture, the list contents now varies.  Some properties changed, and some items have disappeared or been replaced.

To this end, the Metadata Working Group has just released a guideline which suggests methods to increase interoperability and storage of shooting settings and other associated data in digital images. It also aims at standardizing the availability of metadata across all applications and devices, making it easier for users to create, organize and share their pictures.

What this means is that if the JPEG or RAW file followed the rules of storing information, you can run this through a software (which also follows the guidelines for metadata) and organizes the pictures for you.  Right now, no such software exists.  You have to organize your pictures manually.  And as any photographer knows, after a certain point, manually organizing pictures takes more time than taking pictures.  And the more information you deem is important, the longer it would take to organize.

The members of the group represent big names in different related industries.  And it would be to everyone’s advantage to make a standard metadata accepted by all the other manufacturers.