Thank you for your question, and for your positive review of the plugin. Reviews and positive feedback are a great motivator to keep working on the plugin and supporting its users.
As you probably know, IPTC and EXIF are two standards for embedding “metadata” such as author credit, keywords and copyright notices in image files. There are many tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom for entering this data. Even the Windows Picture Viewer has some features for adding metadata to image files.
There is also a newer standard, “XMP”, that provides more powerful features for managing metadata.
MLA Allows you to access and extract the metadata from image files. The iptc:, exif: and xmp: prefixes can be used in an [mla_gallery] shortcode to access the metadata for display in a gallery. The Settings/Media Library Assistant IPTC/EXIF tab lets you define rules to “map” (copy) metadata values to standard fields, taxonomy terms and custom fields.
The current MLA version does not offer any features for adding or editing metadata in the image files. To enter the metadata in your image files you must use one of the many tools that support that.
I hope that clarifies how MLA uses IPTC/EXIF metadata. I am marking this topic resolved, but if you have any further questions about how to use the features MLA provides, please post them here and I will do everything I can to help you get the answers you need for your application. Thanks again for your interest in the plugin.
