Descriptive metadata

The Descriptive metadata tab (keyboard shortcut Alt+D) allows you to edit basic information about your photographs, such as the title and description.

The data form is mostly disabled until you select one or more images to edit.

The first thing I usually do with a new set of photographs is to set the title. Select all the images that should have the same title, then type the title in the Title / Object name text editing box. Hovering the mouse over the data field displays a popup “tooltip” describing the sort of information to put in that field. This help text is taken from the IPTC standard.

Note that the title (and headline) are stored in XMP and IPTC-IIM but not in Exif, so may not be visible to software that only handles Exif metadata (see tag reference for more detail). You may prefer to leave these fields blank.

The legacy IPTC-IIM standard has a maximum number of bytes for each data item. If your text has more bytes then the excess is shown underlined in blue. You can ignore this if you don’t need compatibility with old software that relies on IPTC-IIM data. This warning can be turned off in Photini’s configuration.

The Title / Object name field has an optional spell checker, enabled with the Spelling menu.

The word “Château-Gontier” is not in the British English dictionary, as indicated by the red wiggly underlining.

Right-clicking on a misspelled word invokes a context menu with a spelling sub-menu. This shows any suggested alternatives, one of which can be chosen by clicking on it.

Note that all the image thumbnails now have a warning symbol (⚡) displayed next to them. This shows that they have unsaved metadata edits. The File menu Save images with new data item (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+S) saves your edits and clears the warning symbols, as shown below. I do this frequently to avoid losing any of my work.

Now you can add more detail in the Headline and / or Description / Caption boxes. (My descriptions are usually so short that a separate headline summary isn’t needed.) There are probably only one or two photographs that share the same description, so select those images first.

If you select several images you may see <multiple values> displayed in some of the text boxes. You can right-click on the box to bring up a context menu from which you can choose a value to be copied to all the selected photographs. Very long texts are elided with ... replacing some of the text. (If only one choice is shown it means some of the images have no text in that field.)

The Alt Text (Accessibility) and Extended Description (Accessibility) boxes are where you describe the photograph for visually impaired users. These are a recent addition to the IPTC standard - in future image display programs and web sites should use this metadata to create their “ALT text” image description.

Added in version 2024.10: The Keywords field has been moved to the Keywords tab.

The Person(s) shown box can be used to record the names of any people in the photograph. This also shows any people named in the Image regions tab.

Finally the Rating slider allows you to note any particularly good or bad pictures. Good pictures can be given a one to five star rating.

Bad pictures can be given a reject rating. This is stored in the metadata as a rating value of -1.

Alternative Languages

Some fields, such as title and description, are stored in XMP as Lang Alt data. This allows translations into alternative languages to be stored along with the default language text. (Only the default language is stored in Exif and IPTC-IIM.)

Photini has a language drop down selector next to each Lang Alt data field. If the current text is in an unspecified language the selector shows Language, otherwise it shows Lang: and the current language. Languages are specified with an RFC3066 code. This usually starts with a two-letter language code, e.g. en for English, and may be followed by a hyphen and a two-letter country code, e.g. en-GB for English as used in Great Britain. You can add another language by clicking on the drop down and selecting <new>.

Next you can set the language to be added, e.g. fr-FR for French as used in France.

You can then type the translation in to the text field. Of course the English spelling checker doesn’t recognise most French words.

If you install the appropriate dictionaries then setting the language of a Lang Alt data field also selects the dictionary used by the spelling checker. (Deliberate spelling error introduced for illustrative purposes.)

You can change the language of some existing text by right-clicking on the language selector drop down to bring up its context menu. This has options to change the language to your computer’s default or to any other language.

If there is already text in the language you change to then that text is merged with the current text.

When there is more than one language you can choose which one is the default with the right-click context menu. The default language appears first in the language drop down selector.

When a Lang Alt data field has multiple values, you can use the drop down selector to select each language in turn before right-clicking on the text to choose one of the values. You can also change the language of multiple values with the language selector context menu.

Copy and paste

The usual context menu allows cut / copy /paste / delete of the widget’s text. Photini can also perform these operations on all the languages in a Lang Alt data field.

Copy and paste

You can copy and paste all of the “descriptive” metadata by right-clicking outside any data field. (You can also delete all the data!) The cut and copy actions are disabled if any of the data fields has multiple values.

This menu, and the Lang Alt all languages menu, uses a private clipboard, rather then the shared clipboard used by the usual data field context menu.

More information about the data fields

Click on any field name below to see the IPTC definition and user notes for that field. Although these fields are defined in an IPTC standard, they are all stored in XMP metadata. Some of them are also stored in Exif and/or “legacy” IPTC-IIM data.

Title / Object Name: A short title.
Headline: A brief description.
Description / Caption: The who, what and why of what the image depicts.
Alt Text (Accessibility): Text description for visually impaired accessibility.
Extended Description (Accessibility): Extended description for visually impaired accessibility.
Person(s) shown: Name(s) of a person(s) shown in the image.
Rating: How good is the photo.

Comments or questions? Please subscribe to the Photini mailing list https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/photini and let us know.