IPTC

Picasa is nice. It speaks raw, looks good and works well. The only problem is the database: It looks like everything is stored in a bunch of weird file – and just sharing these between users is a hassle. Or so I thought. But then I learned that Picasa also speaks IPTC,), which apparently is a format used by journalists to archive image metadata. Basically, captions and keywords are written directly to the image files. Two minutes of googling, and I had a python file for reading IPTC ``

janus@IONHOME ~/Desktop/iptc
$ python iptc.py lauge.jpg    
{'Keywords': 'lauge\x00', 'Caption': 'Lauge p\xe5 t\xe6ppe\x00'}