How Permanent.org Reads Embedded File Metadata

When you upload a file to your Permanent.org archive, we use select metadata embedded within the file to populate our Permanent metadata fields. If you are interested in using this feature to populate Permanent metadata fields, the following article explains how the Permanent system reads, extracts, and uses embedded metadata to populate Permanent fields. 

At this time, Permanent is unable to read and extract metadata from TIF files. We are working on improving this feature to include more file types, so check back soon.

In general, the Permanent system prioritizes IPTC fields within the IIM data block for all metadata fields. If no IPTC fields are present in the file, the system will look for relevant EXIF Fields for the Permanent metadata field. If neither are present, nothing will be populated for the Permanent metadata (except for the Name field, which will be populated with the file's name without the extension).

Permanent Field	IPTC Field (Priority)	EXIF Field (Second Priority)	Other
Name	Object Name	Title	Defaults to the upload file name (without the extension) if no IPTC or EXIF values are present
Description	Caption	UserComment	None
Date	None	(In order of priority): DateTimeOriginal DateTimeDigitized DateTime GPSTimeStamp + GPSDateStamp	None
Tags	Keywords	None	None
Location	None	Calculated from GPSLatitude + GPSLongitude and run through Google Maps API	None

Any metadata not extracted for use in Permanent metadata fields will be retained in the original file.

We currently do not support writing Permanent metadata back to downloaded files from your archive, so any metadata changes you make within Permanent will not be embedded into your files. We are working on this feature, so check back soon!

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