Zmarties

IPTC metadata in images, already widely used by professionals, has received a recent boost amongst casual and amateur photographers, since Picasa uses it to store its caption and keyword information.

If you dont wan't to fire up Picasa just to look at this IPTC information, a very useful free utility is IPTCExt. This Windows shell extension allows you to add columns to the Explorer details view, holding the IPTC fields, and to set the fields from the file's properties dialog. The utility has gone a few years without an new version, which illustrates the simplicity and elegance of the solution - the only problem with it that I know of is that it does not handle UTF8 encoded IPTC information, but then again that's common with much IPTC handling software.

In a similar vein, there are other Windows shell extensions for handling image metadata that you may find useful:

• EXIF InfoTip displays EXIF info as you mouse over files in Explorer
• pixvue is an extensive application written only as shell extensions, that handles EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata
• ViewEXIF is a IE and Firefox extension, that displays EXIF data for images in your browser
• Opanda IExif is a shell extension that handles EXIF, GPS, IPTC and also works in Firefox