Image::IPTCInfo README
by Josh Carter <josh@multipart-mixed.com>

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.

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

