IPTC has created a design for adding specific metadata to regions inside the wide view of a 360° image.
This design supports defining many regions in such an image and associating an idividual set of metadata with each region.
A 360° photo viewer supporting the IPTC metadata is able to show metadata, e.g. names of persons, next to the region. See that in the examples below.
An organisation holds a meeting to discuss metadata for 360° photos and videos. While the 22 persons around a U-shaped table discuss actively a 360° camera, placed in the centre of the U-shape, takes a photo. After that discussion a photo editor takes action and sets region areas around the heads of some participants of the meeting. In a next step she adds to each region the name of the shown person. The definitions of the regions and the names of the persons are ingested into a set of metadata about the image as a whole, like the date and time when the photo was taken and the name of the photographer.
A user looking at this photo could enable displaying the metadata of a region, in this case the names of the persons.
The taken photos are transferred from the camera to a computer and a software stitches them to a single 360° image which uses the equirectangular projection. This stitched photo is save to a JPEG image file.
The JPEG image file is read by a software supporting equirectangular 360° images. In a first step the photo editor creates a region area around the heads of 4 persons. The used software supports setting rectangles anywhere in the image and to derive from that action the x and y coordinates of the 4 dots of this region area.
This image shows the editing user interface of the software: the defined regions of the image are shown as green rectangular polygons and an internal reference, in this case R1 through R4, above the rectangle. This image shows also the reference lines of the coordinate system for the region areas: as horizontal line the central parallel and as vertical line the central meridian, both in red. These polygons and characters in green and lines in red are not part of the 360° image, they only provide a visual help for the editor.
In a next step the photo editor opens a form provided by this software which lists all defined regions and allows to add a description of and names of persons show in this region.
| Region No | Name(s) of Person(s) |
| 1 | Pam Finner |
| 2 | Gerald Inartinger |
| 3 | Linda Burnon |
| 4 | Stephane Gutinould |
After adding the names of the four persons the photo editor clicks a Save Metadata button which embeds all metadata properties associated with this image as XMP packet into the image file.
The image below shows the equirectangular image displayed by a 360° photo software which supports metadata for regions as proposed by IPTC.
A user may activate the option “Show Region Info” of this software.
Then the software reads each defined region from the set of regions and sets the polygons in an invisible way. In a next step the PersonInImage metadata for each region is read and displayed right above the polygon of this region.
By disabling the option “Show Region Info” the names of the persons disappear. (Which can't be done with this image as unfortunatly the set of IPTC metadata is currently a proposal only.)