It has been a while I have used the OneDrive Windows 10 app, and since that time to my amazement it has been updated with some features to bring it at par with some of the functionalities available with the OneDrive Web App.
Among these, is the ability to add Captions and Tags to photos. There was already a way to add captions and tags to photos via the OneDrive website, surprisingly the Android app still does not provide a way to view nor edit captions.
Something which I like with OneDrive in particular is that it writes the captions and tags back to the photo metadata, which is something important for many archivists. Other online services do not tie nor allow an easy way to export this information easily. For example, you can export the file metadata from Google Photos as a separate file using Google Takeout, and Flickr provides a similar functionality. Still, after exporting your photos and metadata, writing this information to the image file is not so easy. So OneDrive clearly has an advantage for this type task as it could tie in nearly seamlessly with your photo management workflow have on your PC.
Integrating with your Photo Management Workflow
Photos stored in OneDrive can be synced back to your PC along with the captions and tags and can be read and edited using your preferred photo management application. It is worth it to understand how the captions and tags are read and written to in each application to avoid any conflicts or out of sync metadata, as even though applications may follow common standards their behavior can vary. OneDrive seems to follow the same behavior as in Windows Photo Gallery which I discussed in my post entitled Accessing Windows Photo Gallery Metadata using Exiftool.
OneDrive Auto Tags
OneDrive also has auto tags, which are tags added using Microsoft’s computer vision services. These tags are not written to the file, just displayed. In the screenshot provided, OneDrive tagged the image with “Sky”, “Outdoor” and “Building”. I added the “landmark” tag manually. Any tag added by the user however, will be written back to the file. Flickr has a similar feature, but differentiates between the automatically added tags with the user added ones by changing the tag appearance, which in my opinion is a better design. If you wish to write the tags back to the file, I wrote about a workaround in the post – Saving OneDrive Photo Auto Tags to the file metadata.
Cameras nowadays can store a lot of additional information into a photo, this information is commonly known as metadata. Along with the date, time and camera settings a lot of information you might not even know is stored along with the image such as the camera’s serial number, location information (on some GPS enabled) cameras and as I found out today the temperature. Certain Canon cameras store the camera temperature as described in this post:
José Oliver-Didier 