[Digikam-users] Best way manage free form information about the content of an image?

[Remco Viëtor]

On Tuesday 10 April 2012 12:28:24 Simon Cropper wrote:
> Hi,
(...)
> I am in the process of scanning in quite a lot of historical images.
> 
> The intent is to get other people to sit down with me in front of the 
> computer and tell me who is in the photograph, where the image was 
> taken, etc.
> 
> How is this information best stored - tags, comments, captions, notes?

    I'd use a mixture of those: captions/comments to describe the picture, and 
use tags for persons, locations, type of events and such (things that can be 
captured accurately in 1-2 words). 
    As you are going to do it with other people giving you the information, 
putting the information in the correct field on the spot might be difficult. 
You might want to record (audio) what the others are telling you about a photo 
for later reference, and clean up notes and tags in a second pass.

> How safe is the information once captured? If the directory tree is 
> changed or file moved how can I ensure the data goes with the image?

    For formats like PJG, PNG, TIFF, Digikam can write tags, captions, 
comments etc. to the file as metadata. In that case the data will stay 
associated with the image. (and, back up the images before adding the 
tags/comments, just in case)

> How can I export this data, with or without image, to an external format 
> -- a webpage or example?
    Tools like exiftool or exiv2 can extract metadata (Exif, ITCP, XMP, ...) 
in a readable format. After that, there's a lot of possibilities to use those 
data (scripting...). A lot will depend on the number of images you're dealing 
with, but from your signature, I guess you know how to do that part...

Good luck,

Remco