If you've had a boring morning, need to get your head spinning or just simply like to get confused beyond recovery: take a close look at the newly released overview chart of all commonly used metadata fields in professional environments:
[img=thumbnail]images/uploaded/201105201430284dd67b048395f.png[/img]
Now, in case you are a professional photographer, this is no horse play for you! There are a bunch of fields that are critical and should be filled, depending on what your role is. If you plan to sell your images to a stock agency, you should really fill all fields marked red (stage 1) shown in the following chart:
[img=thumbnail]images/uploaded/201105201434524dd67c0c6316b.png[/img]
Rules are different for news photography. If you want your pictures used in the news industry, you need to take a close look at the red and yellow fields here:
[img=thumbnail]images/uploaded/201105201436464dd67c7e18044.png[/img]
[img=right]images/uploaded/201105201503324dd682c496e3f.jpg[/img]If you don't sell your work, you can sit back and relax - you really don't need to worry about too many fields, but focus at least on these:
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Creator - most likely the person behind the view finder
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Location - where was it shot?
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Description - meaningful account about what the picture is about
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Keywords - single common words (i.e. persons shown, event type, location), avoid writing variations (ie. either singular or plural)
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Date/Time - usually added by the camera (Exif)
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Rating - your personal rating (helpful i.e. if you want to spare your audience to fall asleep due to a tsunami of pictures during a presentation)
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Copyright - no copyright is a problem if you post them on public websites (Flickr, Facebook)
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ThumbsPlus 8 Info PanelIn case you want to get your hands dirty, you can take a look at how ThumbsPlus 8 handles metadata fields by opening the file
C:\Program Files\ThumbsPlus\Data\xmpnames.dat. All metatdata fields are addressed by their XMP field names, even if its corresponding values are actually stored inside an Exif or IIM block (the older Iptc standard for storing descriptive metadata fields).