Taking care of your metadata
Metadata in digital photos has always been something fragile. Ever since the beginning of digital photography camera manufacturers tried to add useful photo information to the image files. However, this data was not recognized by common photo editing programs. In order to view the data included in the files special software had to be used. In most cases only the manufacturer’s own software could read it, and sometimes did not even exist any.
But even worse, because common software tools did not recognize the metadata, they were not able to save it either. As soon as a picture was saved after editing, all the metadata had been gone.
The situation improved after the introduction and broad adoption of the EXIF standard. All professional photo editing programs nowadays read and save EXIF metadata. The EXIF standard has its weak spot, though. Because it was impossible to include each and every tag that manufacturers wanted, the specification left room for so-called Makernote data. Each manufacturer can include their own data block which does not comply to any standard.
With Makernote data, the same problems as before are returning. Editing with imaging applications, even software with official metadata support, will likely destroy the Makernote. Even just editing standard EXIF tags, for example using the file properties dialogue in the Windows Explorer, will leave the file without this manufacturer specific data.
In order to protect your metadata from being altered or erased, Picmeta introduces the EXIFcare™ technology. This technology enables our products to not only read Makernote data from almost any digital camera, but also save it correctly after each operation. This means it is possible to edit EXIF tags, adjust the date/time of picture taken, execute lossless rotations and update embedded thumbnails, while retaining all the other metadata.
If you are in need of using software that is not as metadata-friendly as ours, EXIFcare™ allows you to backup complete metadata headers. This way, you can restore the data after editing your photos in other programs. This also prevents from standard EXIF tags being added or changed as it happens with many applications.
With EXIFcare™ you can trust in the best possible protection of metadata in your photos. The technology is included in our products Picture Information Extractor and PIE Studio and will also be the basis for our future development.