One of the less-trumpeted features of the Lightroom 3 final release is the addition of the IPTC Extension to the metadata panel. These new metadata categories were approved nearly 2 years ago, but few applications have adopted them. (Of course, idImager was probably the first – Hert is always ahead of the curve).
These new panels offer the ability to describe your images in some interesting ways. You can note the name of people who are in the picture, for instance. (A picture of the White House might be about Barack Obama, for instance, even though it is not of him.) You can also note the presence and id of a model release, lots of information about artwork that is pictured, and additional location tags. Of course these won’t all be useful to everyone, but certain fields will be quite valuable for certain images.
More info after the jump
Photoshop CS5 can read these fields right out of the box, but they won’t be easily visible in CS3 or 4 – at least for a while. If you’d like a description of what these fields offer, here’s a chart that is published on the dpBestflow.org IPTC metadata page.
But wait, there’s more:
