Part of the motivation to write my Simple Photo Tagger program was to make sure that when I put a caption on a picture, it will be embedded in the picture in all the various “locations” (I have no better word for it) that the various tools out there use.

And let me tell you, it’s a big mess! To illustrate, let me use the WIC query notation for metadata that Microsoft uses and list which program uses what locations to store “caption” (and “select” other) information:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Organizer
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Windows Live Photo Gallery 12.0.1347.718
/xmp/dc:title/x-default

Google Picasa 3.1.0 (build 70.71, 0)
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 1.0
Title
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

Headline
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
Caption
/app1/ifd/{uint=270}
/xmp/dc:description/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Caption

Title
/xmp/dc:title/x-default
/app13/irb/8bimiptc/iptc/Object Name

I actually used Simple Photo Tagger to discover these differences, since it will query most of the above locations and display any that have data “in them”. The ones that don’t have data, will not be shown.

So if you want to make sure that no matter which tool you use to work on your digital photos, they will pick up your caption properly, use Simple Photo Tagger. It will make sure to write your caption to as many locations as the various other tools out there seem to use.