How do I use IPTC/EXIF metadata to categorise photos?

Posted by kbro on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by kbro
Published on 2010-05-04T01:14:02Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 1:18 UTC
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Many photo viewing and editing applications allow you to examine and change EXIF and IPTC data in JPEG and other image files. For example, I can see things like shutter speed, aperture and orientation in the picture files that come off my Canon A430. There are many, many name/value pairs in all this metadata. But...

What do I do if I want to store some data that doesn't have a build-in field name. Let's say I'm photographing an athletics competition and I want to tag every photo with the competitor's bib number. Can I create a "bib_number" field and assign it a values of "0001", "5478", "8124" etc, and then search for all photos with bib_number="5478"?

I've spent a few hours searching and the best I can come up with is to put this custom information in the "keywords" field but this isn't quite what I'm after. With this socution I'd have to craft a query like "keywords contains bib_number_5478" whereas what I want it "bib_number is 5478".

So do the EXIF and/or IPTC standards allow addtional user-defined field names?

Thanks Kev

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