Photo Tagging Tips & Metadata Management

November 5, 2020/April Ganong

Whether you’re new to Tag That Photo or a longtime subscriber, here are a few face and keyword tagging tips to make organizing your photos easy and enjoyable. Further below, we share how Tag That Photo’s non-proprietary metadata format ensures you can view and import your tags in our software and across other applications as needed.

Multi-face Tagging

For faster tagging, use the dot menu at the top right. Tag more than one face by holding down the CTRL button while pressing the left mouse button for the thumbnails of interest.  Then, click on the dot menu in the upper right for any one of the selected thumbnails and add a “name” tag.

TTP face tagging
Preview Images
  1. Click on any one thumbnail to see a preview of the full image in the right-hand pane.
  2. Double-click on any image (not face) thumbnail to view it in the TTP Photo Viewer. You can also add tags from here.
Merge People
If you find you’ve assigned a slightly different name to the same person (Val and Valerie, for example), merging them into one is simple:
  1. Select the thumbnails for the duplicate people.
  2. Right-click on one of the selected thumbnails to display menus options.
  3. Select “Merge the selected People into x” and TTP will merge the images into one.
Rename a Person
  1. Double-click on a thumbnail for a person.
  2. Click on the Edit (pencil) icon beside the name in the title bar.
  3. Press Enter to save any changes.
Find Missed Faces
To check for any faces that might’ve been missed in the initial face detection pass, go to “Search” and select a folder and check the box beside “Photos with no faces.” If you spot a missed face, use the Photo Viewer to manually add a face.

It’s also a good idea to delete any faces you do not know or do not wish to tag.  This reduces clutter in your database and eliminates potential false suggestions.

Metadata Management

We’re committed to providing our subscribers with metadata formats that are non-proprietary.  This means subscribers aren’t “locked in” to using one software application. Whether using Tag That Photo for tagging and other platforms for editing, etc. your image metadata can be easily viewed and imported.
Generally, the rules we follow for managing image metadata are:
  • Write face tags (name and face location in image) to MWG XMP face regions and MS Photo 1.2Schema.  MS Photo Schema often shortened to MP in some programs.
  • Write normal keywords and descriptions per table above.
  • Write geotags (GPS coordinates) per table above.
  • Optionally write People names associated with TTP faces to the following metadata fields: IPTC Core “Keywords” and XMP dc:subject.
  • TTP does not support hierarchical keywords at this time.

Read our Making Metadata Work blog post for more info on

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