Years ago, two things happened at about the same time – Trina became pregnant with twins and I bought my first digital camera. My neighbor was a twin and his father gave some great advice…

  1. If one of the twins wakes up to eat, wake the other one up and feed him too. Always keep the twins on the same schedule.
  2. Write down the names of the twins in your photographs. If you don’t do that you won’t remember which is which (so true). Later on, when the kids are old enough, they’ll want to know who is in the photograph and they don’t like the, “I don’t know” answer.

How do you write down the names in the photos if you’re taking digital pictures? Well, the method I used was to keep a list of photos in a text file. Each time I took a new batch of photos I’d update the text file. What happens if I lose the text file? I have about 3500 photographs of my kids and there’s no way I could go back and recreate that valuable data.

I’ve long know about JPEG EXIF data. This is the data written to each JPEG file by the digital camera. The camera stores information about the camera model, picture settings and data and time. If you’ve never noticed this before, open your favorite image software and look for a menu item called Information. You’ll be surprised at how much data your camera stores!

IPTC data is stored along with EXIF data inside the JPEG file, however, IPTC data is not written by the camera but, by the photographer. IPTC offers dozens of fields from comments, to locations (city, state and country) to keywords.

Keywords are individual words used to describe a photograph so you can later find the photo by typing one or two of those words. For example, everybody likes to take sunset photos but, months or years later how do you find those few photos out of thousands? Do a keyword search on sunset and instantly all of your sunset photos pop up.

The best thing about IPTC data is that now all of my text file comments can be inserted into the photo itself. I never have to worry about keeping the separate text file up-to-date. If I e-mail a photo to family or friends they can see the comments as well. When the kids grow up, I will create a photo album for each one. To find all of Brianna’s photos I can now enter the keyword “Brianna” and pull up all of her pictures. Cool.

I tried a few different programs to edit and search for this data. My favorite is ACDSee Pro 2. It takes about a week or more to develop a work flow but, once you figure it out, the data you can add to your photos is amazing. I highly recommend it. Plus, it’s on sale right now (50% off).