making IPTC data searchable

Question

I have a question about IPTC metadata. Is it possible to search images that aren\'t in a database by their IPTC metadata (keywords) and show them and how would I go about do

Answer 1

If you don't have extracted those IPTC data from your images, each time someone will search, you'll have to :

• loop on every images
• for each image, extract the IPTC data
• see if the IPTC data for the current image matches

If you have more than a couple image, this will be really bad for performances, I'd say.

So, in my opinion, it would be far better to :

• add a couple of fields in your database
• extract the relevant IPTC data when the image is uploaded / stored
• store the IPTC data in those DB fields
• search in those DB fields
  • Or use some search engine like Lucene or Sphinx -- but that is another problem.

It'll mean a bit more work for you right now : you have more code to write...

... But it also means your website will have better chances to survive when there are several images and many users doing searches.