Is there a standard way to tag people and faces in photo metadata?
Asked 7/15/2010
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Websites like Facebook and Flickr let you tag people in photos. Is there a standard in image metadata for storing who is in a photo and, ideally, where their face appears in the image? I’m specifically wondering whether EXIF supports this, or whether another metadata standard is used.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
16y ago
2 Answers
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Adobe's XMP metadata standard supports information defined by the Metadata Working Group (MWG), which includes a definition of how to store face tagged data. See:
Adobe XMP: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/standards.html MWG: http://www.metadataworkinggroup.com/ where you can click on the specifications, download the PDF, and then look at page 51 onward.
So while this isn't "EXIF" per se, it is metadata stored in the image. I'm just starting now to explore how widely supported this is.
Originally by user7035. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user7035
14y ago
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Not in EXIF. EXIF is mainly for technical capture data and doesn’t define a standard way to store who is pictured.
A more relevant option is Adobe XMP metadata, especially the Metadata Working Group (MWG) guidelines, which include a way to store face-region data and associated person information. So if you want structured face tagging, XMP/MWG is the closest standard mentioned here.
IPTC also isn’t a direct solution for a dedicated “people in photo” field; in practice, many photographers store names as keywords instead. That won’t preserve face coordinates, but it is widely usable for searching and organizing images.
So the short answer is:
- EXIF: no standard people/face tagging
- XMP/MWG: yes, supports face-tag style metadata
- IPTC: no dedicated people field; keywords are commonly used instead
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