Picture Metadata and Face Tags: What Software to Write and Read them?

Even though it has "EXIF" in the name, Exiftool can read and write all of these standards. It's very powerful and easy to script so you can write to all the locations you like in the way you need for the other software to understand.

In fact, this is the tool used in the blog post you link. So, I second that recommendation.

I use Geosetter, even though it is focused towards geotagging, the app uses exiftool behind the scenes an also provides decent metadata editing abilities of the fields you mentioned (Captions, Descriptions, Keyword/Tags, Location info), with support for EXIF, IPTC and XMP. Geosetter can read MP Region (xmp-mwg-rs) and MS People Tags, but it does not provide a way to edit face tags. For face detection and tagging I still rely on Windows Photo Gallery.

Also, Geosetter allows you to include custom exiftool operations upon saving changes back to the file, so it is quite versatile. I use them to copy certain tags to their XMP equivalents, specifically ensuring location info such as Sublocation, City, Country are copied to their IPTC 2008 Spec equivalents.

TagThatPhoto is a relatively new tool that supports reading & writing of tags per your list below. I have been using for about three months now on about 20,000 images and it appears to have very good face recognition accuracy and cooperates with XnView and Win File Explorer.

• Date Taken (The date image was taken. I guess this is mainly stored in EXIF. some of my pictures are scanned old photos. so I need to manually enter this info for them.)
• Location (The Location the image was taken. same as above it seems to be stored in EXIF and I need to be able to manually add it to some images)
• Description (a short description of the story of the image if available)
• Tags or Keywords ( a fail-safe alternative to true face tag info. just naming people in Picture as tags.)
• Face Tags (XMP's standard face tags. which is face location and a name)

Here are two more programs that may fit into your nice overview table above.

1. DigiKAM (OpenSource, free). People tagging is present, stored as XMP regions. You just need to configure digiKam so that the XMP data is stored inside the files: Configure / Metadata / Behaviour / Face Tags (including face areas) (Check this checkbox to let digiKam write the face data into the files.)

2. Also, if you've got a Synology NAS, there is Photo Station 6, with face tagging, storing as XMP.

I'm primarily concerned about the possibility to add people tags manually, and stored in the same way as Windows Photo Gallery. I've not tried any automatic recognition in the above that may be possible, perhaps not in both of them.

I've still not decided what to use for myself, so that's the reason for me being here. I've tried the two programs above but neither of them is as simple as MS Photo Gallery (that is no longer supported, and a bit hard to install even if it's possible). And there seems to be some kind of incompatibility between them, when it comes to automatically rotated photos ("portrait" with highest sides on the Y axes), taken with camera. When I download portrait positioned face tagged photo from the NAS (PhotoStation) and open them in DigiKam, then the face rectangles are not on the correct places (I'm not sure which program to blame).

It seems Lightroom (also Classic) is now only available as part of the subscription from Adobe, so I don't think I'd use that for my home photos.

Thanks for the great pingback to my blog! As for software to edit metadata, here are my recommendations - Photo Mechanic and its sister product Photo Mechanic Plus (which has a DAM/catalog feature) are the Cadillacs on this road. If you have the money at hand. XnView is pretty nice. It does subset the IPTC standard, but what it writes, it writes in a standards-compliant way. (Free for personal use) ON1 Photo RAW is an all-in-one that I like better than Lightroom Classic. It's more like Photoshop to work in, rather than Lightroom. It writes very high quality metadata. Lightroom Classic is a standard. If you don't mind the central database for your edits. Very different from ON1. You'll love or hate one or the other. And you don't have to worry about the Exif. Yes, there are three fields that are semantically equivalent to IPTC fields. But Exif is really meant for camera log data, not so much for human-written metadata. Cheers.