What happens if millions of new pictures are posted to the web every day? The pictures could be auto-connected by non-subject metadata like location or timestamp. What is the value of a picture without the story? What will happen to abandoned picture-collecting websites? Is there a standard way to embed metadata about a picture in the picture itself, so it doesn’t get lost?

2 Responses to “”

  1. Simon Willison Says:

    “Is there a standard way to embed metadata about a picture in the picture itself, so it doesn’t get lost?”

    Yes there is, at least for JPEGs. You can add additional information such as a title, caption, photographer and various other fields directly to the jpeg file - Photoshop supports this, as do other programs. That information can be extracted later on using libraries available for PHP, Perl, Python and other languages. Google for “exif” for more information.

  2. Dave Says:

    “RDFPic is a tool to embed an RDF description of a picture into the picture itself”

    http://jigsaw.w3.org/rdfpic/

    Also check out this from Microsoft Research - a tool to embed location information into JPEG exif data, and a browser to browse photos using a map.

    http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/#WWMX+Client+Application

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