You can see some of it with the iOS and macOS versions of Apple Photos. Like other digital cameras, iPhone and iPad cameras also record metadata. you took lots of photos on your New Zealand vacation, but back in U.K., the time stamps on all photos were 11 hours behind.Ħ) You scanned a bunch of 1993 “Baby’s first year” photos, but the metadata “Date Taken” field for all of them shows the 2018 scanning date. “Terri’s First BD001.jpg.”ĭefault file names assigned by digital camera aren’t exactly informativeģ) If location services on your iPhone were disabled when you took the photo, but you now want to add location information.Ĥ) When you have 35,000 photos in your digital library, you probably should add descriptive keywords to help find a specific picture when needed.ĥ) If the date and time setting on your camera was wrong, e.g. “Terri’s first birthday party”, for aiding subsequent organization and search.Ģ) To change the default file name, which might be IMG_0140.jpg or worse, to something more meaningful, e.g. However, there are many reasons why you might want to add or amend some details, for instance:ġ) To add a caption or title describing the photo (or a batch of photos), e.g. Photos taken with your iPhone or other digital cameras already have a lot of metadata. Metadata fields are defined for every conceivable bit of information anyone might want to capture about a photograph, but those most useful to regular folks are: Date & Time Taken, Title (Filename and format), Location, Description and Keywords. Programs such as Photos rely on metadata to display photos by year, or in helping you find photos taken at a certain place. Metadata is extremely useful when you need to search through and organize a large number of photos. We won’t go into the formats and standards for metadata, but you can read about it here or search on the Internet for “ IPTC and EXIF metadata” to learn more. description, keywords etc.) can be added by the photographer. It includes camera details (such as make, model, focal length, exposure etc.), photo details (date, location, format etc.), and other information (copyright, usage terms etc.) Much of this is automatically stamped by the camera, while some (e.g.
Depending on the camera, it can be anywhere from a dozen up to 5,000 pieces of information. This data about the pictures is called metadata. All digital cameras capture photos in the form of data, but they also record a lot of additional data about this data.