What IPTC Data to use

[jhaide]

To start off, not sure if this is the right area to ask this but seems close.
I am wanting to catalog and protect to some degree my images and one of the things I think would help would be to fill in at least some fields of the IPTC data imbedded in the photo files. My question is, what fields of that data set are important and what do you that use them put in there. some of them are pretty obvious like the object name and location fields, but others are a little less so. I also noticed that different software brings up different IPTC fields or at least field names, so that doesn't help matters.
Some of the fields I am interested in are: Copyright, Caption, Headline, Special Instructions, Categoriy, Byline, Byline Title, Credits and Source.
These titles are from the list the IrfanView brings up. The reason I was interested in using it to enter the data is that it has a pretty simple to use batch function that would allow me to quickly fill in a lot of the data that doesn't change from file to file.
Thanks in Advance for any insight you might be able to provide.

John in Hillsboro, OR, USA

[fire_photog]

Hi John,

The fields are subjective. What I mean is that you need to decide what you need for your images. I would use the copyright field without question. I use Adobe Bridge to import my images from the card to the computer and it has a good tool that will allow you to create several profiles and decide what to embed when you import. You can also do the same the Adobe Lightroom and embed on import.



This is the Adobe Bridge panel and as you can see there is a lot to choose from.......

[jhaide]

Thanks Rock. Looks like Adobe adds a lot of fields beyond what the standard IPTC fields use. I wonder what other programs would see those fields. If you are using this for submitting to publishers or sites that sell your photos I wonder what they would see? I did not see many of these fields on the IPTC web site for instance. Seems like there is not much complinace with a standard amongst software vendors when it comes to the MetaData that is editable in photos.