How my photos lost their metadata

Before the advent of digital photography, adding information about photographs was easy: You simply wrote in the margins or on the back of a snapshot. Turn it over and there was the information: "Uncle Jim. Orlando. 1968."

If you were lucky, the photo processor even stamped the snapshots with the processing date ("June 1968"). So those who were diligent enough to use the pen and ink metadata format would, years later, have some idea as to when the images were taken, where, and who was in them.

As digital photography overtook film, programs like Photoshop Album, iPhoto, Picasa, etc. automated the process of adding descriptive metadata to each photo.

But they also separated the metadata from the image itself, and stuffed it into a proprietary database, where it could be indexed for speedier searches. The metadata stored for each image included a pointer that told the photo organizer program where to find the image file it described.

Broken links, proprietary formats

One problem with this approach, one that continues to this day, is that moving or deleting images without using the organizing tool that mapped the metadata to the image file results in broken links -- descriptive data that can't find the photo it's supposed to describe. This bothersome turn of events, usually presented in a pop-up warning shortly after you launch the photo organizer program, requires that you decide whether it's worth the time and effort to have the program scan your entire hard drive looking for images that for one reason or another may not even be there.

But the bigger problem from my perspective is that the database formats aren't exactly open -- each vendor tries to make it as difficult as possible for competing programs to import your photo metadata -- and the formats change over time. If you don't keep current your metadata can fade away like that old ink-jet photo print on the fridge.

Crisis mode

That's the situation I faced after I migrated from an old Windows XP computer to a Mac. I was still using an old version of Adobe PhotoShop Album, a product Adobe discontinued several years ago. I had thousands of photos, all tagged and grouped using Photoshop Album. And while the photos copied over readily, the metadata did not.

I could have just used Apple's iPhoto and started over, but I had a big investment in tagging more than 5,000 photos in Photoshop Album. I wanted my metadata.

The multi-step process was time consuming and costly, but I got it, eventually. At this point I'm still debating whether the effort was worth it. But fo those who are willing, there is a path from Photoshop Album for Windows XP to Photoshop Elements 9 on the Mac.

I'll tell you what I had to go through to get there next time.