How to store the back of a photo in metadata?

Question

I am scanning old family photos.  Any suggestions/best practice for storing the information written on the back of photos?
When it's a name or location, for example, there are metadata tags, but often it is a longer note and, not infrequently, written in a foreign language.  In those cases a typical metadata tag will not suffice.
For those cases, is there a way to scan an image of the back and store that image as metadata to the image from the front?

Bob Macaroni McStevens · Accepted Answer

I think a reasonable archival practice is to digitize both sides and maintain reference data (such as file name) for the other image separately at the "object" level.
Putting the information from the back in the metadata from the front will make it harder to be aware the information exists.
An ordinary picture of the back exposes the information. The front and back as consecutive files provides very browseable access...you might not even need to do anything with involving metadata.
Tagging the images with "front" and "back" respectively, might make search and filtering easier.

LightBender · Answer

The EXIF 2.3 standard has a couple of tags that might be useful:
Exif.Image.ImageDescription - ASCII - A character string giving the title of the image. It may be a comment such as "1988 company picnic" or the like. Two-bytes character codes cannot be used. When a 2-bytes code is necessary, the Exif Private tag UserComment is to be used.
Exif.Photo.UserComment - A tag for Exif users to write keywords or comments on the image besides those in ImageDescription, and without the character code limitations of the ImageDescription tag. Allows 2-byte codes.

How to store the back of a photo in metadata?

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