Image::IPTCInfo README by Josh Carter OVERVIEW Ever wish you add information to your photos like a caption, the place you took it, the date, and perhaps even keywords and categories? You already can. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) defines a format for exchanging meta-information in news content, and that includes photographs. You can embed all kinds of information in your images. The trick is putting it to use. That's where this IPTCInfo Perl module comes into play. You can embed information using many programs, including Adobe Photoshop, and IPTCInfo will let your web server -- and other automated server programs -- pull it back out. You can use the information directly in Perl programs, export it to XML, or even export SQL statements ready to be fed into a database. As of version 1.5, you can also add IPTC info to JPEG files. Now marking all your images with your name (or a folder full of images with a date and location, whatever) becomes a piece of cake. Great news for people who can't stand the tedium of using the "File Info..." command in Photoshop a billion times! NEW FEATURES IN 1.7 Just a couple bug fixes (see Changes file). NEW FEATURES IN 1.6 Better support all-around for JPEGs. It will now handle all JPEGs instead of insisting on JFIF; notably, EXIF files generated by digital cameras are now supported. SaveAs() is also improved with an important bug fix. (If got the error message in Photoshop, "this file is not supported by this version of Photoshop" after saving a file with IPTCInfo, that's fixed.) I'd still suggest trying SaveAs() on copies of images, but I believe all the kinks have been worked out. NEW FEATURES IN 1.5 You can now modify IPTC info objects and resave the file. Thus, you can very easily do something like add copyright notices to all your images, set the creation date of all images in a folder to something, etc.. Super-huge bonus. NOTE: Please only work with *copies* of your images, or use SaveAs(), since I don't have enough field reports to say the code is definitely bulletproof. Also, file parsing on JPEGs is much smarter. IPTCInfo should always be able to find the info, even if there's other meta-data in your images (e.g. EXIF) that messed up previous versions. INSTALLING Instaling IPTCInfo is just like any other Perl module. Run the following from the module's director: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install The last line must be done with superuser access if you're installing into the system's perl libraries (default). DOCUMENTATION Run: perldoc Image::IPTCInfo PROBLEMS? Send me an email with any questions, comments, bug reports, etc: josh@multipart-mixed.com CREDITS IPTCInfo has turned out to be very popular -- much more than I expected. That means I've had a wonderful user base sending me emails with suggestions, bug reports, test files, and so forth. Many thanks go to all who have helped! The test files have been especially useful in ensuring compatibility with all graphics programs and digital cameras. I'm sure I've left some people off this list by accident, but here are some users who have contributed to IPTCInfo: Dirk Koppers Paul Bayer Murray Chapman Lee J Carmichael Sean Warburton Alfred A. Lorber Paul Krohn Nils Rossmann Alexander Ng My apologies again to people whose names I've missed.