I spent some some writing titles, captions, keywords, and copyright info for my photos in the metadata before uploading them, only to find that the smaller resized versions of the photos do not retain any of this information at all! So it is not surprising that Google has a such a hard time finding anything on this site. Perhaps the metadata should be retained for the smaller versions, eh? After all, these versions are the ones that will available to the public, and therefore out there for search engines to find.  I don't know about you guys, but I don't share my original files...

I also use Flickr, and Flickr retains this info for all resized photos, so I think Zenfolio should too.

Almost seems like a bug to me.

Bart

I'm not that certain that search engines currently read or index exif/iptc data embedded in a photo.  the majority of photos contained in websites have had exif data stripped from them to reduce filesize and increase loading speed.  Many images are scanned from prints and therefor do not have exif data embedded in them.  I did a search and was not able to find any difinitive article on the subject of SEO tied to image exif/iptc data..

And please, do not confuse 'exif' data with 'meta' data.  meta data is typically used to describe the tags used in the underlying coding of web 'pages'.  exif (and more recently, iptc) data is the data that gets encoded into an image file by a digital camera.  so when you see posts or pages talking about SEO and meta tags or meta data, know that it is most likely not referring to exif/iptc data.

Metadata is simply data about data and is not in any way specific to the coding of web pages. The data contained with EXIF and IPTC are metadata.

Come to think of it, I am also not sure if search engines see the metadata of images. But I think, at the very least, the resized photos should retain the author and copyright metadata in the photos, for obvious reasons. But the more information that is retained, the better, so that people know what the image means, and where the image came from.