Save Metadata is a cooperative effort among software companies, nonprofits, and experts to enable the consistent capturing, sharing, interoperability and preservation of family history metadata in digital media. The effort for deciding the minimum metadata for family history purposes was done by the Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG).

We don’t create new standards, we gather recommendations for how to implement them.

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What We Do

Save Metadata is working on the education and implementation of family history metadata created by The Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG). There is a set of recommendations that digital media platform developers can use to improve how they capture and store family history metadata using existing standards like IPTC or schema like XMP and EXIF.

How We Operate

The Savemetadata board, comprised of representatives from founding member organizations, meets bi-weekly to set the goals and cadence of the work according to our roadmap. At each stage, members of the working group are called on to conduct research, deliberate, take action, make decisions, or do the work of drafting recommendations.

How to Get Involved

We do most of our work in a shared Google Drive Folder (request access). Our resultant recommendations are hosted in our GitHub repository. We organize our members and conversations about our work in our LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. Join us in these spaces to participate or send us an email at info@fhmwg.org.

Save Metadata Now!

The Information and Stories Associated with Billions of Valuable Captured Experiences are Destroyed or Lost Annually because:

The who and what depicted in the media was never recorded.

The information and story behind the depiction is disassociated from it.

Neither the information, the stories or the media were digitally preserved.

When the only people possessing this knowledge are lost to us, the knowledge is irretrievably lost with them. SaveMetadata is dedicated to solving this problem!

Learn more

Watch our RootsTech Connect 2021 presentation to learn more about what we’re doing.

Our Mission

Enable the consistent capturing, sharing, interoperability and preservation of family history metadata through effective planning, standardization and frequent communications to archives, libraries, history organizations, standards bodies, commercial vendors and websites in order to establish, adopt, and promote this metadata.


Our Purpose

We seek to enhance the value of digital media about people by refining the process and capability for storing and embedding metadata


Board Members

Chair, Rick Voight – Vivid-Pix

Secretary, Robert Friedman – Permanent.org

Gordon Clarke – FamilySearch International

Maureen Taylor – MaureenTaylor.com

Jeff Looman – FileShadow.com

Theo Vaskevitch – Mylio.com


Founding Group Members at Large

Joel Cannon – FHISO.org

Beth Ann Wiseman – FamilySearch International

Christopher Desmond – MemoryWeb.me

Nancy Desmond – MemoryWeb.me

Luther Tychonievich – FHISO.org

What We Do

The SaveMetadata team is working on the education and implementation of the work done by the Family History Metadata Working Group (FHMWG). SaveMetadata has been developing a set of recommendations that digital medial platform developers can use to improve how they capture and store family history metadata using existing standards like IPTC or schema like XMP and EXIF.

How We Operate

The SaveMetadata Team, comprised of representatives from founding member organizations, meets bi-monthly to set the goals and cadence of the work according to our roadmap. At each stage, members of the working group are called on to conduct research, deliberate, take action, make decisions, or do the work of drafting recommendations.

How to Get Involved

We do most of our work in a shared Google Drive Folder (request access). Our resultant recommendations are hosted in our GitHub repository. We organize our members and conversations about our work in our LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. Join us in these spaces to participate or send us an email at info@fhmwg.org.