Metadata - which fields to use?

[Skids]

Hi,

I am new to Photo Mechanic and am interested in using it in an attempt to beat my collection of images into shape.  In the past I have used other applications to set keywords and the odd star rating but now I wish to store meta data in more appropriate fields and I wonder if there is a guide to which of the multitude of IPTC/XMP data fields should be used?

For example I chose a set of images taken on a photography day that was held in a local village hall.  The location I would like to assign to my images is :

St. Nicholas Church grounds and hall
Haxey
Isle of Axholme
Doncaster
North Lincolnshire
U.K

and I would like to know which fields should be used to store this address.

This paragraph concentrates on the "city" fields but my more general question is which fields should be used.  Looking at a single image in Photo Mechanic's default information pane "Metadata(IPTC) info" shows a list of fields grouped under headings forming blocks of associated data fields. Two of these blocks contain fields that record addresses. 

The first block has a title of "Event and Location" and includes for example a field named "City".  The next block is named "Locations Taken and Shown" and that also includes a field named "City".  Reviewing the list of "Searchable Fields" shows a field named "City" described as "city.legacy" and another field named as "Location Shown: City" is described as  "shown.city". 

Am I correct in thinking that the "Location Shown:" is referring to the block with the heading "Locations Taken and Shown" in the Info pane and that this is the more modern set of data fields that should be used over the fields marked legacy and is storing data in variable "shown.city" ?

Is there documentation that describes how fields in the UI map to Photo Mechanic variables and to image file metadata and which also gives helpful hints which are best used on almost untouched images?

Have the IPTC / XMP provided any dedicated method of storing a location in "What3Words" format e.g. ///massaging.parsnip.launched ?

Thanks for reading,
best wishes
Simon

[ahoward]

''shown.city' returns results based on what is added to the table at the bottom of the section in the Metadata Info window called "locations taken and shown". There are also the text fields that refer to the location where the image was taken, and those can be searched by using 'created.city' or 'taken.city'. I believe these were indeed added to differentiate between what an image depicts and where the camera was located when it was taken.

Is there documentation that describes how fields in the UI map to Photo Mechanic variables and to image file metadata and which also gives helpful hints which are best used on almost untouched images?

Do you mean Photo Mechanic's variables feature, or the field names that one must use for performing searches in Photo Mechanic Plus?


I do not know if the IPTC has any acknowedged the what3words system. You could always put them in the 3 supplemental category fields.

[Skids]

Do you mean Photo Mechanic's variables feature, or the field names that one must use for performing searches in Photo Mechanic Plus?

No, it was a more general questions related to adding metadata  :

a) Should the IPTC fields that map to Photo Mechanic variables that have names ending ".legacy" be avoided when adding metadata to images ?


best wishes
Simon

[ahoward]

I'll defer to what the IPTC has to say about this: https://iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/userguide/#_locations

It seems that the purpose of the new fields is to avoid the ambiguity inherent to the legacy fields where there is no obvious differentiation between where the image was captured and the location depicted by the image, so if you'd like to avoid that, you should use the new fields. Other software that is reading the metadata also may prefer the newer location fields or vice versa, so that may also be a factor.

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

Is there documentation that describes how fields in the UI map to Photo Mechanic variables

For that in general, yes. See this table:

https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48001174616-metadata-iptc-template-map

-Mick

[Skids]

Hi,

Thanks for the links which were useful.

best wishes

Simon