Wednesday, September 19, 2007, 8:50pm
On a recent TUAW, a reader asked about image metadata being handled such as keywords and the like on the Mac:
I wondered if you could give some insight / explanation into keyword tagging on the Mac. I'm a long-time Windows user contemplating switching, though I'm hesitant to do so b/c managing thousands of photos on Windows is so easy, especially with Vista's new Photo Gallery, which embeds tags (or keywords) right into the original file's metadata via XMP (Adobe's standard). I understand that iPhoto does NOT embed the keyword metadata into the original file, but - instead - stores it only in its own library, thus obviating the benefit of keywords should you move your photos elsewhere at some point (onto an external hard drive, for example, or another machine). Is there a good way to get the keyword/tag into the original file's metadata, a la Windows Vista? Does Aperture do this?
TUAW responded:
Well the first thing that comes to mind is that you could simply use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on your Mac if you want to use the XMP metadata format. As it turns out (see this Macworld review) Aperture 1.5 is able to export XMP sidecar files, but not import them. So all things considered if XMP support is important to you I'd suggest just staying within Adobe applications and you should have cross-platform functionality unless Vista messes it up.
So I sent in this comment to them:
There was a question from a reader about how various applications, including Aperture, handle metadata, such as keywords. Aperture is indeed a non-destructive image editor/DAM application which in turn means that any keywords or other metadata (such as copyright information, photographer, city, state, country, etc) is stored in the Aperture database. It is also worth noting that if the metadata is embedded in the file, it is usually using the IPTC format [1]. If the reader makes the switch to Mac and Aperture, the reader has numerous export options including, as mentioned, the option to export the XMP sidecar [2] file. Your blogger neglected to mention in Aperture, if one exports the image version as a JPEG, the keywords, along with other metadata is embedded in the image in the industry standard IPTC format [1]. , which would then be readable by pretty much any other application. There's also a handy PDF that maps out how the IPTC field name maps to the Aperture field name [3]. (Whether iPhoto behaves in this manner is beyond me, I've never touched it.)
Hopefully this clears things up!