IPTC vs XMP

Hi all—we’ve had a few inquiries about our IPTC import mechanism, and why it seems to skip captions in some cases. The explanation is a bit technical, so I’m going to explain it here for everyone’s reference.

In late versions of Photoshop Adobe has stopped providing traditional IPTC editing; instead, they’re now using something called Adobe XMP, which is intended to replace IPTC.

Although IPTC and XMP are compatible enough that our IPTC importer can grab XMP “keywords”, XMP has dropped the “caption” field. This means that if your image’s metadata is formatted in XMP, we can get to your keywords, but not your caption.

We’re hoping to have an actual XMP importer soon; in the meantime you may have to add captions to your Lightstalkers images manually. If this is a big problem, you could also try to work around this by editing your images’ IPTC captions in something other than Photoshop.

I don’t happen to know if iView, Photo Mechanic, et al, happen to allow standard IPTC editing (as opposed to XMP), but I would hope so.

To recap: If your image’s metadata is coming through with keywords, but not captions, it’s probably due to an incompatibility with late versions of Photoshop. We’re working on this and hope to have it resolved so that you don’t have to sweat the acronyms.

Thanks,

by Shinji Kuwayama at Thu Jan 03 23:27:57 UTC 2008 (ed. Mar 12 2008) Chicago, United States | Bookmark this | Digg this |

Photomechanic can indeed write both at the same time, XMP and legacy IPTC data. Or, depending on its settings, even update the legacy IPTC from the existing XMP caption or vice versa.

by Frantisek Vlcek | 04 Jan 2008 19:01 | Prague, Czech Republic |

However, iView (Microsoft Expression Media) sometimes does not write IPTC fields correctly. Resyncing will not fix this. Only regenerating the image, or writing the IPTC fields in another program will correct this.

by David Gross | 04 Jan 2008 22:01 | Los Gatos, California, United States |