I think I've been here before but still.....

Is there absolutely no standard at all for photo image metadata?

Yes, I know there's EXIF and IPTC and XMP, but they only define the names of the fields one can store, they don't tell you *what* the fields are for.

Firstly there's a ridiculous number of fields, the full list goes on

for pages and pages, you might as well say 'store anything with a name

like exif.abd,def'.

Secondly there are no rules about what you put in which field and every program I can find seems to have a different idea of what you put where. As a result it's all pretty useless apart from a very few

IPTC fields like Copyright. There doesn't even seem to be a 'most popular program' that has managed to set the default usage.

All I really want to know is where to put:-

Title Longer Description Tags

While one can come up with sort of semi reasonable defaults for Title

and Description there really doesn't seem any remotely useful way of

handling tags if you want any sort of semi-sane hierarchy. To make *any* sort of sense tags need hiearachy. E.g. for our horses an image

needs animal/horse/Mikey or something of the sort. Similarly for places one needs USA/Alabama/Birmingham or UK/Warwickshire/Birmingham.

Birmingham by itself is fairly useless (as Mikey might well be!).

Plus a final rant, there seems no widely accepted way of handling extended character sets, some programs reject ISO 8859-1, others reject UTF-8, etc. Bla, bla, bla.

It's just *awful*.

Is there no way out of this mess?