Originally designed to allow press photographers to provide information concerning images they sent back to the home office, IPTC fields can be used to store supplemental information about an image. IPTC information differs from EXIF information in that EXIF information is generated by the digital camera and contains information about various camera settings. IPTC fields can be used to “annotate” images with a great deal of information.

BPP has the capacity to read and display IPTC information. BPP can display IPTC information anywhere it can display EXIF information. For example, BPP can display comments contained in the IPTC Caption field and will display them below the slide image. In order for this to occur, the “IPTC Caption” option must be checked in the “Comment sources” section of the JAlbum Settings-Advanced-Metadata tab. BPP can also display IPTC fields as Thumbnail Tooltips, Thumbnail Captions, Folder Tooltips, Folder Captions, and Slide Captions.

BPP can also display IPTC information in the EXIF information window. To do this, Meta Data Custom Fields must be edited to contain the IPTC tag names desired (more information on how to customize this uservariable is available at the Customizing the metadata information displayed section.

The following IPTC tag names are available (grouped by the tabs found in Irfanview):

Addition field with unknown use (not appearing on Irfanview tabs)
Iptc.Directory Version

The screenshots to the right show the various IPTC fields as viewed from a wonderful piece of freeware software, Irfanview (another freeware product, Exifer, can also edit IPTC and EXIF data). Because the IPTC fields are “freeform”, they can accept any text. It is not necessary to fill in IPTC fields with information related to the IPTC field names (although if displayed in the EXIF information window, the field name will appear and may be misleading to the album viewer).

More Information

There is a wonderful tutorial written by Gordon Dodge available on the JAlbum forums; Gordon explains in detail how one might use IPTC fields together with BluPlusPlus.