Group Cooks up New Photo Metadata Standard

The Metadata Working Group has proposed a new format to standardize the way metadata, like when and where photos were taken, is stored alongside the actual photo files.

While the popular JPEG format unquestionably reigns as the standard for consumer-level digital photography, storing the so-called metadata that goes along with pictures, like the camera they were taken with, time, and camera settings, remains a wild west of different formats. The Metadata Working Group, a consortium formed by Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony, hopes to get that all straightened out in the future with a new standard for photo metadata.

 The organization released a statement [PDF] at Photokina 2008 on Wednesday announcing its intent to unify the industry around a single format. “We’ve been working very hard to produce guidelines that are compatible across all applications, devices and services and that provide best practices for how, when and where metadata should be changed in popular file formats,” said Josh Weisberg, chairman and founder of the Metadata Working Group.

Specifications for the format were initially sparse, although Weisberg seemed to indicate that the group’s work would focus more on consumer-level data to begin with, then move on to the metadata used by pro photographers later.