Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata

The Metadata Working Group (an industry consortium including Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony) have just published the second version of their Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata.

In their own words, it’s “a major new version of the Guidelines”.

This expanded specification builds on existing metadata standards to describe several emerging consumer properties that:

• Use regions to record faces, focus points, barcodes, or other data in an image
• Provide hierarchical keywords to richly describe and classify images
• Flexibly identify an image as part of a greater media collection

I’ve had a quick look through it, and it looks very good. Here’s hoping that software developers start following it. At the very least, please make the developers in the companies that comprise the consortium follow it. On past performance, their record has been, shall we say, somewhat patchy up until now.

Of particular interest is the attempt in the guidelines to set cross-industry standards for recording faces in images. At the moment, every software application does it their own way. Let the attempt to herd cats begin…