Microsoft Photo Info: Metadata in Windows Explorer, Supports IPTC and XMP

Posted by Andy Atkinson on March 26, 2007 | Post type: Gain

Microsoft Photo Info is a tool for adding metadata to your photos. Released in January 2007, this is a free tool for Windows XP SP2 or Vista (32-bit versions) that will help you update batches or individual photos with titles, keywords, descriptions, locations and other information. I've been using Photo Info to add metadata to photos I've shared on Flickr for 2 days, and it has worked better than any of the other Windows solutions I've tried thus far. In addition to reliable Flickr integration, Photo Info is completely navigable by keyboard, a real speed booster when working with hundreds of photos, provided you are quick on the keyboard.

Microsoft Photo Info

Edit As Collection: Bottom button toggles back and forth between editing as a collection or individually

Photo Info will only work with Genuine copies of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installed, and requires the .NET framework. After you meet these two requirements, installing the program is quick. There is no executable in the Start menu or on the desktop, instead Photo Info is available from the right-click context menu. You can launch it from an individual photo, or from a batch of photos, by right-clicking and selecting Photo Info from the menu. From the Photo Info FAQ page, the following file types are supported: JPEG, TIFF, WDP, HDP (HD Photo), NEF, CR2, and CRW. So far I've only tested with JPEG, but it looks like RAW formats from the big two players, Canon and Nikon, are supported as well. Another benefit once Photo Info is installed, is you'll see more of the EXIF data like Aperture and shutter speed, when hovering over any of your images.

Tags in Flickr: Photo Info tags will be extracted correctly in Flickr

Tags in Flickr: Photo Info tags will be extracted correctly in Flickr

The advantages to tagging files locally is that I can move the files to other photo sharing sites, other local applications, or other operating systems (Windows to OS X for example), and descriptive information about the photo will be retained, as long as some third-party standard is adhered to by the reader and writer. Photo Info supports IPTC and XMP which is great, and should mean that the metadata you enter with Photo Info is portable despite where you move your photos to later. For more details see the Photo Info FAQ.

Edit As Collection: Bottom button toggles back and forth between editing as a collection or individually|

Edit As Collection: Bottom button toggles back and forth between editing as a collection or individually

For batch operations I was able to click the "Edit as a Collection" button in the bottom right. This was particularly useful for inputting location data (Photo Info calls this origin). Flickr treats the city and country fields as tags on upload (in my testing), which was great for me because that is the convention I follow for my photos anyway. Photo Info will also offer you suggestions for previously entered locations.

For individual editing, the same button in the bottom right toggles back to "Edit Individually." Once I clicked this, keyboard navigation between the photos is possible with "Page Up" and "Page Down" to go back and forward respectively through your selected batch. Operations on 25 photos (in my testing) took a couple seconds or less. Like most tabbed Windows applications, navigation between tabs is possible with keyboard shortcuts "Ctrl-Tab" to go to the next tab, or "Ctrl-Shift-Tab" to go to the previous tab.

Edit As Collection: Field values will be applied to all photos in this mode

Edit As Collection: Field values will be applied to all photos in this mode

By navigating with the keyboard, something that is not possible in other applications I've used for tagging, I am able to update batches of photos more quickly. Since Photo Info is a native application, it feels familiar and seems to be of high quality. Compared with smaller applications like iTag I've used for tagging photos, Photo Info does not seem to suffer from bugs or crashes. Note I have not done testing with very large batches of photos or mixed file types.

Firefox 2 spellcheck: Firefox spellcheck caught an error in my description text, unfortunately Photo Info does not have built-in spellchecking

Firefox 2 spellcheck: Firefox spellcheck caught an error in my description text, unfortunately Photo Info does not have built-in spellchecking

On the negative side there is no built-in spellchecking, useful for longer text areas like the Description field. I did notice that I had a "last line of spellcheck defense" with Firefox 2 though (when uploading to Flickr), since it includes built-in spellchecking. Also there doesn't seem to be any way to add geography latitude and longitude coordinates. Until the time when cameras have built-in GPS devices and can write geography coordinates into the photo files themselves, it would be useful to have a user-friendly and fast way to enter geography information. These things are both fairly minor for me though. The bigger problem is that this is a relatively obscure add-in for Windows that most people will miss, when in reality, this tool should be integrated into the operating system, and more help should be provided to less savvy users instructing them how to tag their photos. Perhaps future versions of Windows will integrate Photo Info. Until then, snag this very useful free download for your photos management today.

About the author(s)

Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

Comments

# Karl at 4/1/2007 10:35 am cst
What does the copyright checkbox do? Does it add a watermark to your pictures?

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# Geoff Coupe at 4/4/2007 7:53 am cst
Photo Info has two issues as far as I'm concerned. First: it currently only supports the older IPTC standard of IIM, not the current IPTC4XMP. Second: it doesn't like the way in which some metadata editors handle metadata, and falls over if it can't parse the metadata. See the following: - [http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!3230.entry](http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!3230.entry) - [http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!3121.entry](http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!3121.entry) As I mention in the second blog entry, I sent details of the problem through to the Microsoft Photo Info team in January. Deathly silence has ensued thus far, and no sign of a fix.

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# Andy Atkinson at 4/6/2007 9:32 am cst
Wow Geoff, someone else on a quest for a great metadata authoring tool like me! I will look into your posts more thoroughly. When I added data to photos and had not touched the files elsewhere, I found that Flickr understood (presumably IPTC) the metadata that I expected, so this was a short, "integrated into windows" solution for me that works for the time being. Ideally I'd have something that is cross-platform, adheres to the most open, flexible standard (probably XMP?), still understood by Flickr and photo sharing sites in general, and is not clobbered when edited in other local applications. I tried PixVue, iTag, jUploadr and some other terrible applications on Windows, and PictureSync, iPhoto on Mac, all have shortcomings and bugs, and most are not very flexible or tolerate edits in other applications. Adobe Lightroom is now on my radar, and I haven't tried Aperture in OS X for this work either. I would personally be surprised to get a response from Microsoft, especially in a small amount of time. I'm sure it varies between groups and Microsoft applications, but the rate at which a bug is reported from an end user (from a profitless application) to when it reaches a Microsoft developer that could fix it, is probably many months (any Microsoft employees here?).

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# Jacob at PictureSync at 4/6/2007 9:23 pm cst
Microsoft's forward-going policy with Vista appears to be that IPTC is only supported as a legacy standard, meaning if a file does not already contain IPTC data it will only write XMP. This is a brave move—and good, because IPTC is clunky at best for modern demands. But whilst most professional digital imaging apps support XMP, few consumer level apps do, and as I am aware only a single online service does (Twango—not Flickr). This means that although XMP may be great as a local metadata interoperability/portability standard, it will be sometime before it is truly portable across services, so solutions like PictureSync that transfer and preserve your metadata separately from the file to a service are still going to be required. The temporary solution is to write both IPTC and XMP to your files (as MediaPro/ExpressionMedia does), but the trouble with this is that then if only one is updated by another app they'll become out of sync.

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# CJ at 8/15/2007 8:53 am cst

Maybe I don't get the nuances, but it appears from the FAQ that Photo Info does write both IPTC and XMP metadata:

Q. What happens if there is a conflict between metadata properties?

A. If the same property is stored in a file in both IPTC and XMP formats, Microsoft Photo Info gives precedence to the XMP value. When saving changes to a file, Microsoft Photo Info attempts to write the new values to both IPTC and XMP formats (if the Windows codec for that file type supports both). In this case, the property values will be synchronized. In the case of CR2, CR2, and NEF file types, XMP metadata is not supported if a RAW Windows codec is not installed.

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# Anne Gaides at 9/13/2007 11:30 pm cst

Hi, I discovered this site when googling Photo Info. I downloaded it as I want to change the create time for about 1,000 images. We have been on holiday & took photos with 2 cameras, then discovered that one had time set incorrectly - result is cannot sort them by date/time. Photo Info seems to work ok to change time on single image but gets weird results for batches. Can anyone help with this???? (grovel etc)

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# Gus at 2/17/2008 12:14 am cst

fyi - in googling for a tool that could change photo times I rediscovered iTag. It has come a long way since its early days and can now change the photo create times. I've now ditched Photo Info in preference to iTag and Picasa.

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