Does Google picasa store metadata in the pictures?

JPEG / Picasa Metadata Export

• Picasa/Jpeg Questions: How can I export metadata from my massive photo collection? Also, is there any reasonable way to get the face recognition information into the pictures themselves? I'm looking for a tool that will export the exif, iptc, path, filename, and file system metadata (date created, modified etc.) into a spreadsheet or some other portable format. I'm about to do a big reorganization of my collection and I want to have a backup of all the metadata in case I mess something up. Looking through the older posts on this subject I found Exifer, but its so old (2002) that I wonder if its export facility will work on more recent images. It would also be nice to extract the picasa face recognition info out of the picasa database or picasa.ini files and put them into the pictures themselves. I know I can tag the pictures with the face rec. name, and that will go in the jpeg, but that doesn't keep the coordinates of the face box in the picture. These coordinates are only stored in the picasa database / picasa.ini's I've spent a ton of time tagging all my pictures with picasa's face rec. thing and it makes me nervous that this info is at the mercy of picasa's database. I know that the picasa.ini files in the picture folders contain much of the database info, but I still dont trust it. I would like to continue to use picasa as a viewer, but I'd like to have a more powerful tool for managing my metadata. Ideally something like mediamonkey, but for photos instead of music. It would be nice to look at all the fields for the whole collection and be able to sort by these of the fields. I found this thing that seems to be able to do what I want, but it only goes in one direction: It can extract the face info and put it in the files, but once it is extracted, there is no way to get picasa to recognize this new metadata and recreate the database based on this. http://www.anvo-it.de/wiki/avpicfacexmptagger:main I basicaly want to be able to have a fresh install of picasa and feed it my pictures folder and after a few hours of processing be back to the way I like it. This way, all my hard work is contianed in my pictures folder and nowhere else. Any ideas? Please keep in mind that I'm dealing with a very large collection, around 50,000 pictures.

• Answer:

  I am totally clueless regarding the face recognition part. Adobe offers a 30 day (I think) free trial of Lightroom. Along with the http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/lrtransporter.php (donationware) plugin, you should be able to (in their own words) "generate a 'companion' text file for each exported photo as well as an overall summary file. These files are built to your own specification from the metadata embedded in the photos." "companion and summary files can also be generated independently from an export" CSV & XML are also mentioned in the overview, so I guess you have a chance of getting a file that could be useful later outside of LR, but I wouldn't hang my hat on it.