Raza Photos reads the dates, places, titles, people and albums already stored inside your files, from seven common and open standards. When two sources disagree, a fixed priority order decides which one wins, and the tables below show it exactly.

Supported metadata standards

Date taken

The most precise capture timestamp available is used. Raza Photos handles EXIF, IPTC, and ISO 8601 date formats automatically, including timezone offsets.

Priority Source Standard
1 Original capture time EXIF DateTimeOriginal
2 Digitization time EXIF DateTimeDigitized
3 TIFF datetime TIFF DateTime
4 XMP creation date XMP CreateDate
5 IPTC dates IPTC DateCreated / TimeCreated
6 File creation date Filesystem

GPS coordinates

Latitude and longitude are read from the EXIF GPS dictionary, capturing directional references. If coordinates are present, Raza Photos can look up the city and country through Apple Maps. How that works →

Via Apple Maps. Place names are looked up with Apple's MapKit, so the coordinates being looked up go to Apple, under Apple's own privacy policy. Nothing goes to us.

Country and city

Location labels (country and city) can be stored directly in metadata by tools like Lightroom, ACDSee, or a previous Raza Photos save. When they are absent, reverse geocoding fills them in from GPS coordinates.

Priority Source Standard
1 Country / City fields IPTC
2 Location extension fields XMP
3 Category hierarchy ACDSee XML
4 Reverse geocoding from GPS Apple Maps (MapKit)

Title

A human-readable title for the photo. Falls back to the filename if no title is found in metadata.

Priority Source Standard
1 Object name IPTC ObjectName
2 Title field XMP dc:title
3 Filename (without extension) Filesystem fallback

People and face regions

Person names and face bounding boxes are read from XMP and ACDSee metadata. Face regions written by ACDSee are converted to a standard format for display.

Field Source
Person names XMP PersonInImage or ACDSee region names
Face bounding boxes ACDSee regions (converted to standard format) or XMP
On-device detection. If face data is not present in the metadata, Raza Photos can detect and group faces using Apple's on-device Vision framework. No images are sent to any server for recognition. How it works →

Albums and events

Albums and events are extracted from ACDSee's category XML hierarchy embedded in the file. This allows libraries previously organized in ACDSee to carry their structure into Raza Photos without manual re-organization.

Burst sequences

iPhone burst sequences are identified and grouped automatically. Raza Photos checks three sources in order to detect burst membership.

Priority Source
1 Apple MakerNote burst fields
2 XMP custom burst tags
3 Burst metadata previously written by Raza Photos

File dates

File creation and modification timestamps are read from the filesystem and used as a last-resort fallback for date sorting when no embedded capture date is available.