Peakto: the best tool for annotating your images

2.2 Annotating your images and videos

While Peakto gives you access to the metadata and annotations present in the underlying catalogs or files, you can also add your custom annotations.
You can also annotate by:
  1. Flags
  2. Color Tags
  3. Ratings
  4. Favorites
  5. Title /Caption / Copyright /...
That information appears once a photo is selected:
  1. in the inspector
  2. in the Detail view, at the bottom of each image
  3. in the Grid view, by clicking on the Edit icon.

The inspector gives additional information about the origin of the annotations. A blue icon indicates that the annotation has been made in Peakto. Click on it to reveal the annotated version from the original editing app.


2.2.1. Annotations and XMP Sidecars

Peakto can leverage XMP sidecars to exchange annotations with other tools that support XMP (Adobe Bridge, DXO Photolab,...). This is currently restricted to sources that are “Watched Folders”. In order to activate this option, open the Peakto Preferences panel and select the Sync tab.


To activate the XMP roundtrip for Watched Folders, simply select “Automatic” for the XML Roundtrip option. When selected, it means that a sidecar XMP will be created or updated every time the corresponding master version is updated.

In the case of JPEG files, an additional options lets you control whether the annotations should be written into the files. This is useful as some tools don’t rely on XMP sidecars for non-RAW files but read the metadata from the images themselves.

Activating the roundtrip via XMP lets you use Peakto to add annotations to files and see those annotations propagated to other tools that leverage XMP data.

2.2.2. Annotations and Exporting

When exporting annotated versions from Peakto, the annotated values can be added to the exported images through an option available in the export panel. Choose the appropriate option from the Write Metadata in File dropdown menu. The All Metadata and Exif and IPTC (no GPS) both write custom annotations back to the file.