As part of my contributions to the Drupal Open-Source project, I am working with various methods for metadata mangement in Drupal. I have several modules in development for working with:

• EXIF data
• XMP data
• Watermarking and credits
• Conditional image processing based on metadata
• Working with image metadata as part of the Drupal content management workflow
• Bulk imports of annotated images, eg importing titles and captions when uploading galleries

These initiatives work closely with other Drupal projects like RDF and my own Imagecache Actions module
Not all the code is production-quality yet, although parts of it have already been deployed and used in some of the sites I've built.

There is a lot of documentation in the open code repository (and help docs distributed with the code), outlining my research into this area, and comparative evaluations of image/media management software. This is slowly being developed.

Online (raw) help docs outlining the process and Walkthrough documentation (sans illustrations) are available online.