Writing IPTC Metadata to Masters
I know some of this has been discussed, but I've got a few more questions on the topic. To ensure my captions, keywords, and location information is always available no matter what cataloging software I use, I wish to write my IPTC metadata to the master images. Here are my concerns:
1) I have altered the Creator, Headline, Source, Caption, Keywords, Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields - I assume all of these will be written to the masters since they're IPTC standard? Are there length limits for these fields (that is, is there a risk that some will be truncated)? Are there any drawbacks to writing these tags to the masters? (I know many people here don't want their originals touched, but as long as it doesn't affect the quality of my jpegs, I'm fine with it.) Most of my recent photos have GPS metadata - I have not altered these, nor have I added location data to photos that didn't originally have them, so I'm assuming those fields wouldn't be affected?
2) Is there no IPTC-standard field for people shown in a photo? (I know Aperture/iPhoto's Faces is proprietary, and I'm guessing so is Adobe's People field in their XML metadata.) Should I then just assign people's names as keywords, or is there a better way? (This wouldn't be a problem, as relatively few of my photos have human subjects.)
3) I have a library of about 45,000 pictures, all of which (except for about 1400 movies) have had some piece of metadata altered. I've noticed Aperture starts to get slow after I've been working in it for a while - so, should I write the tags in stages, or should I just highlight all of them at one time and let it work? About how long should it take?
4) Finally, I've tested writing the tags to the masters on a few of them, and I've noticed the "date created" shown in the Finder gets changed to the current date and time - Does this mean the entire file was re-created? Would Time Machine have to then re-copy all of them? (My masters total 153 GB, so that might take a while to back up.)
I know this is a lot at once, but it was a fair amount of work to migrate from iPhoto to Aperture (even with Aperture's convenient import feature) since iPhoto's cataloging tools are different from the IPTC standard. I'm contemplating another migration, and I don't want to have to go through all that again.
Thanks in advance.
1) I have altered the Creator, Headline, Source, Caption, Keywords, Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields - I assume all of these will be written to the masters since they're IPTC standard? Are there length limits for these fields (that is, is there a risk that some will be truncated)? Are there any drawbacks to writing these tags to the masters? (I know many people here don't want their originals touched, but as long as it doesn't affect the quality of my jpegs, I'm fine with it.) Most of my recent photos have GPS metadata - I have not altered these, nor have I added location data to photos that didn't originally have them, so I'm assuming those fields wouldn't be affected?
2) Is there no IPTC-standard field for people shown in a photo? (I know Aperture/iPhoto's Faces is proprietary, and I'm guessing so is Adobe's People field in their XML metadata.) Should I then just assign people's names as keywords, or is there a better way? (This wouldn't be a problem, as relatively few of my photos have human subjects.)
3) I have a library of about 45,000 pictures, all of which (except for about 1400 movies) have had some piece of metadata altered. I've noticed Aperture starts to get slow after I've been working in it for a while - so, should I write the tags in stages, or should I just highlight all of them at one time and let it work? About how long should it take?
4) Finally, I've tested writing the tags to the masters on a few of them, and I've noticed the "date created" shown in the Finder gets changed to the current date and time - Does this mean the entire file was re-created? Would Time Machine have to then re-copy all of them? (My masters total 153 GB, so that might take a while to back up.)
I know this is a lot at once, but it was a fair amount of work to migrate from iPhoto to Aperture (even with Aperture's convenient import feature) since iPhoto's cataloging tools are different from the IPTC standard. I'm contemplating another migration, and I don't want to have to go through all that again.
Thanks in advance.
Mac Pro 4,1 (8-Core 2.26 GHz), Mac OS X (10.6.4), 10 GB RAM, 2x 750 GB HD, Radeon HD 4870, 24"LED Cinema Display, iPhone 3G S
