semi colon and search engines

[Debra]

Hi:
When working on organizing my images, I used the semi colon choice when inputting file info in Photoshop.  I am having someone re-do my website and want to add new images from the catalog.  The designer questioned my use of a semi colon rather than a comma to separate keywords, which was/is a choice according to Photoshop File Info.  He said he wasn't sure if the semi colon might not present a problem for search engines.  He would just be copying the keywords from my file info and so picking up the ; there. I'm using Expressions Media for cataloging on a pc.

So, does anyone have "for sure" answer on this one way or the other?  And, if I have to change from ; to , is there a suggested way to do it easily or at least quickly rather than opening each image and each file info?

Thanks,

Debra Ferguson
debra@southern-images.com

[peterkrogh]

Debra,
There is a difference between the entry keying, and how the data is written. Photoshop lets you use the semicolon, but thats not what it writes to the file. 

So the question has to do with how the keywords are being written - what program is being used - and how it takes the data entry and translates that to keywords. 

When Photoshop writes keywords, here's what it's really doing under the hod:

 <dc:subject>
    <rdf:Bag>
     <rdf:li>Personal</rdf:li>
     <rdf:li>Misc</rdf:li>
    </rdf:Bag>

(The dc:subject field is the keywords field.)
Peter

[gcoupe]

Peter,

I have the impression that Debra's reference to "search engines" referred to engines such as Google, Bing, etc. But so far, I see no evidence at all that Google or Bing actually use image metadata to index their searches. Instead, the only source data that seems to be used is the text surrounding the images on the web pages themselves.

If I use Google image search, I only ever seem to get results where the search terms are reflected on the web pages containing the image. I've never seen a case where Google has used image metadata to return a result. Same for Bing.

Do any web search engines out there actually look at image metadata?

Thanks

[peterkrogh]

Geoff,
I think I did actually address her question, but I think you are correct about the larger point. Even if Google is starting to read embedded metadata (which I'm unsure about), it's certainly nowhere near the value of text that is visible on the page near the photo.
Peter