Organizing, Keywords and Metadata

This chapter will describe the Metadata features of Bibble 5's Asset Management portion of Bibble 5.

Photographic Metadata, or information about your pictures, can make searching and finding your images much faster and easier. "Metadata" simply means information about your images, including data recorded by your camera, like the date and time the image was captured, the exposure settings like shutter speed, and aperture. You can also add your own metadata to your images to record what the subject is, who your client was, where you took the photos.

Viewing and adding Metadata to your images can be done when working within in a Bibble Catalog or when using the File System mode. However, searching and browsing by Metadata will only include images in your Catalog.

There are standard sets of photographic metadata that Bibble 5 allows you to view, search and browse by, and edit:

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EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format): Data typically recorded by the camera about the settings used for that image. Most EXIF metadata is not editable, and is common to all Versions from the same Master File (because all Versions from the same Master will have all been shot at the same time, with the same camera settings). Common EXIF metadata includes shutter speed, aperture, ISO Rating, and other exposure and camera settings.

•	IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council): Data added by the photographer that describes the image contents and information about the photographer, including copyright, caption, and image description.

Bibble 5 also supports other types of Metadata, some of which can be shared between various applications. This metadata includes:

Not everything in Bibble 5 can be shared amongst every application that supports XMP files. Different applications have different methods of storing some metadata, so incompatibilities may exist. Bibble 5 saves all your image adjustments in these same XMP files; however, these changes cannot be seen in other applications. For example, if you adjust the exposure and saturation on a RAW file in Bibble, these changes will be saved to an XMP file for that image. Opening that same RAW file in Bibble at a later date (with both the RAW file and XMP file in same folder) will show the image with the adjustments you've made: exposure and saturation. However, opening that same RAW file in other image editors will show the original RAW file, not the RAW file with your edits intact. In order to make the adjustments you've made in Bibble visible to other applications, you must export the RAW file to a editable format like JPEG or TIFF, then open that exported file in the other application.

Bibble 5 stores its settings in an XMP file that is slightly different that other popular image editors and Asset Management applications. We do this to circumvent limitations inherent in the current XMP standard (such as only being able to export the metadata from one Version at a time, or the inability to save different settings for a RAW file and a JPEG that were created in camera as a RAW+JPEG pair).

Bibble 5 uses a similar, but slightly different filename to store this enhanced XMP data. The XMP filename is created by simply adding ".xmp" to the end of the complete filename for the image file it describes (while many other applications build the XMP filename by first dropping the image file extension (like "jpg", "nef" or "cr2") before adding "xmp"). So a Bibble 5 XMP file would look like img_0000.jpg.xmp while an XMP from other applications for the same image would simply be img_0000.xmp.

Bibble 5 will allow you to create a "standard" XMP file that other applications will read - but this will of course limit the settings that the other applications see to those officially supported by the XMP standard (one set of metadata per image file).