HOW TO Add METADATA To PHOTOS: ORGANIZE Your ARCHIVE.

your photos are basically useless if you don't have an easy way to find them so today we are going to talk about one of the least fun the least sexy but arguably the most important part about maintaining a photography archive and that is metadata but first it's a new year and with a new year comes a new intro dropping now let's go [Music] wow see i like that because it makes me look a lot cooler than i actually am in real life but let me know what you guys think and hey thanks for stopping back in the channel so i get a lot of questions about metadata this is a topic that a lot of people asked me about so i figured i'd make a video and hopefully you guys will find this helpful so thinking about metadata what is it and why should you use it well i'm going to go back to one of my stupid analogies that i do from time to time on this channel so let's say you and the boys are hanging out and you want to do taco tuesday night but you don't have any ingredients you need to go to the store well being the boys that you are you don't really go to the store quite so often you have no clue where anything is well luckily everything there is organized perfectly for you you've got aisles that are labeled with the food that's in there and then within the aisles you've got sections that are labeled even further so for taco tuesday you need to find the international aisle then within the international aisle you need to go to the mexican section and then you need to find your beans your rice your salsa your tortillas all that good stuff then before you know it you're back at home making tacos with the boys so that in a nutshell is what metadata is like sort of just go with the analogy but in this video i'm going to take you guys through the basics of metadata kind of explain what it is and how and why it's helpful and then at the end i'm going to give you a live demo of how i use my workflow to incorporate metadata when i'm editing and storing and archiving photos so let's jump into it so what exactly is metadata well in its simplest form metadata is a set of data that gets applied to every and any photo that you take and it contains all kind of great relevant information about the photo and the great thing about metadata is that it can be applied to your file and it gets transferred and goes along with that image file no matter where it gets moved to or where it gets distributed to so basically it's like an id tag for your photos now when it comes to building out metadata for your photographs really there are three main categories of data the first is descriptive and that's the information about the actual content of the image so this is the important stuff the caption the who the what where when why any persons locations companies products or anything else that's shown within the image goes in this descriptive category and then you have the rights category this is another super helpful use for your metadata and this is what allows you to identify who the creator is and most likely that's you the photographer and also any copyright information mandatory credits that need to be used any sort of model rights or releases property rights or any other specific usage information that might be helpful later on for that image and finally you've got the administrative data and this is also very very helpful for things like the date the image was created instructions for end users of the photo and any other relevant details related to your archive all of this information is key to smoothing your workflow and easily finding your image via search either whether that's in your own finder on your machine or within any sort of online archive that you or your organization uses [Music] i'm a photographer i want to take pictures i don't want to write captions and fill out a form with all of this writing all right i hear you i get it but hear me out metadata is super super important for a couple of reasons and it's an essential skill that all photographers should have now the first reason is think of your archive your images that you've shot over the course of your career as that grocery store right whenever you want to go in there thankfully everything is organized by sign for you and you can find stuff pretty easily but think about if those signs weren't there you would have no clue where anything is that's kind of how it is when you start to build up an archive you have shot so many images that you just don't know where exactly everything is and you need this descriptive metadata in order to find what you're looking for and pinpoint the exact location very quickly and very efficiently now here's another reason any professional organization that uses photography in any way whether that's a newswire a newspaper a sports team a magazine or any other type of company that uses photography is using metadata in some way shape or form and the reason for them doing that is because they're dealing with such a large volume of photos day in and day out sometimes thousands of photos every single day going into their archive and so they need a way a system to keep it all organized and be able to find what they need in a very quick and efficient manner now here's the thing you probably haven't thought about if you are looking to get hired by one of these companies they are going to most likely require that you know or have knowledge of metadata and how to use it and how to apply it to their photos each one of these companies has their own template that they use to organize their photos when it comes to metadata and they expect that you're going to know how to use metadata and how to work with their filing system to get them the photo they need so that they don't have to spend the time on their end adding the captions adding the keywords adding that important info so it is an essential skill for photographers i think it's one that gets overlooked but you have to learn it it's just as important as learning how to shoot is how to caption and how to properly use your metadata [Music] all right well how do i actually use metadata okay well here's the high level overview and then as this video goes on we'll get more in depth and i'll show you a more specific example of how to use it so metadata takes the form of what's called an iptc template an iptc stands for international press telecommunications council basically this is just a fancy way of saying it's this group of people that came together to develop a standard for information that can be embedded into a digital photo so basically just think of your iptc stationary pad as a pad of paper that gets stapled or paper clipped to your photo that contains all of that photo's relevant information now you can make a metadata stationary pad in a variety of programs you can actually use both photoshop or lightroom to do this and they make it super easy but the program i use is called photo mechanic now photo mechanic is kind of the industry standard for adding metadata and it's used by photography organizations across the world so the reason so many professionals use this program is the ease with which you can apply metadata to large volumes of photos and quickly sort through thousands of images without a hitch this is not a free program but it is relatively inexpensive there are a couple different versions you can buy starting with a license at 139 and just important to note this is not an annual subscription this is just a one-time license key a one-time purchase to buy the program i've got the link in the description below for you guys if you're interested i highly recommend you check it out definitely worth it so once you're into photo mechanic all you have to do is go to image metadata iptc template and here's what your metadata template looks like it's your basic metadata template so you can see you've got all these different descriptive fields at your disposal and you can fill those out as complete or incomplete as you like my suggestion for metadata is to build out a template that suits your needs and keep that template consistent throughout everything you shoot so in other words all the photos that we shoot at the red sox have this basic same template format which looks like this and so every photo that we shoot that gets uploaded to our archive gets uploaded with a descriptive caption a general description headline a list of any relevant keyword our copyright information and our capture information and this makes it super easy for us to go into our archive type in whatever we're looking for and find it right away now what i'm going to do is drop a link below with a download for my basic standard template now this is the one that i use and you can use this as a base to get started and you can make your own tweaks based off of that once you've got that metadata template built out it's time to apply that template to your photos so i've got a folder of photos right here that i shot of a snowy fenway park so i'm going to bring those into photo mechanic right here you're going to highlight all of your photos so apple a select all your photos and you're going to go to image metadata iptc template and from there it'll bring up your template and you can build out the information that you need so the date that i shot this was october 30th 2020 october 30th so you basically just fill out all of this info [Music] for my headline i will do fenway snow and then my list of keywords this is super super important these are keywords that i'm going to apply to all of these photos to make sure that they get tagged with these words so fenway park snow fenway snow snow weather storm and that's good to start and then what i'll do if everything looks good is hit apply template to selected and that will apply that template to all of these photos so then if i click them one by one all i have to do is select the photo go to the i tab right here for info and that will bring up your caption and metadata info so then what i need to do is just fill out the specific part of the generic caption so a general view of the field as snow falls then i'll add a few descriptive keywords to help out general view overall interior and then i'll move on to the next one so i just hit save and move on and then i can continue the process all the way through [Music] okay so now i've got every single one of those photos complete with a built out caption and a list of keywords so you can see as i scroll through everyone is totally captioned totally keyworded got all the information ready to go and ready to be uploaded to our archive there are a couple tips and tricks that i want to show you some insider tips or things that you might not have known before that'll help make your process of adding metadata just a little bit faster you probably noticed that when i was going through and making those captions i had to type the same caption over and over again a couple times for the same photo or the same type of photo now there's an easy way to fix that and give you a shortcut to work through that process a lot quicker so this is a general shot of the ballpark kind of an overall shot of the ballpark i do have a few of those in this gallery so what i'm going to do is just type my caption for one a general view of the ballpark as snow falls i'm going to add my keywords general view overall interior then what i'm going to do is hit this copy button right here so this is just basic copy and paste so when you hit this copy button it will copy this metadata everything you just typed and it's got that copied and saved then i can just easily go to another photo that has that same caption so this is another general view shot of the ballpark and all i have to do is hit paste and it will add those captions and those keywords right in so it just makes the process a little bit quicker i'll show you another example here we've got two shots of wall-e right here so basically the first one i'll just type my caption mascot wally poses as santa i'll add a few keywords in molly mascot santa and then i want to apply this to the second photo in this sequence with the same exact captions all i have to do is hit copy then go to the second photo hit paste and it applies it right to that photo as well okay now here's another tip that will help you out if you are shooting for multiple different people or you have multiple different templates that you can apply depending on the situation that you're in you can go down to this lightning tab and this is called your snapshots tab and basically what this is is a way to save presets of metadata templates so that you don't have to create that template every time you ingest a new photo shoot or ingest a new card that you need to caption so as you can see here i have these saved based on the different type of templates that i need depending on what i'm shooting at the red sox so i've got my regular red sox template this is my standard template that goes into our archive and then i also have the getty one saved as the gedi format and this is for the photos that i also file to getty images which is a newswire service that collects images from all around the world they require and they use a different template than the one that we use so it's nice to just be able to go back and forth between the two depending on what i'm shooting and this is a super nice way to manage your templates and switch back and forth in a quick easy way what i'm going to do is just make a basic template for today just to kind of show you an example and how i would save this so today's january 19th i'm in boston billy weiss's youtube video [Music] so let's say i want to save this as a snapshot so basically all i have to do once i have the template ready is hit the lighting bolt hit save and i can call it whatever i want youtube demo template i hit ok and now i've got that saved to my snapshot so i can access that template whenever i want to you probably noticed that it was pretty annoying for me to have to type in all of these things for every single batch of photos that you are bringing into your computer to caption so typing all these things like what month is it what day is it what day of the week is it now there is a workaround for that and the way to do that is to use the variable code replacements that are offered from photomechanics so i have this code template saved under my snapshots it's got all these different codes built into the caption this is actually something that automatically builds in that info for you based on your camera's clock so assuming you have your camera clock set correctly it will bring in all of that relevant information the date the day the month the day of the week all of that stuff the time it was shot and these are called variables and camera bits which is the company that makes and develops photo mechanic has this list online available all these different codes and variables that you can type into your iptc metadata template to make your process a lot more efficient and this is available online i've got the link in my description below so make sure you check this out if you want so all you have to do is pick which codes that you would want to use and then bring them into your template when you're building and just separate them by the curly brackets this looks like a bunch of code right now but when i hit apply template to selected it brings in the exact day the exact year the date that i shot those photos so it's pretty cool now the key is you have to make sure your camera is correct but it just saves you so much time and not having to make sure that you manually enter all of those relevant information finally one last trick when you ingest a card from your camera you can apply the metadata automatically as that card gets ingested into the computer so once you plug the card in photo mechanic will pop up with this window and there you just choose your destination where you want to save your images off your card [Music] and then all you have to do is hit this box right here which says apply metadata template to photos so that means if that's checked it will automatically apply whatever iptc template that you choose to all of the photos that get ingested into your folders so all you have to do is click your metadata and then you just want to make sure that you have the right one selected you just hit load go to wherever you saved your template i've saved it within the folder select that metadata template you can see that'll bring up everything that you need and then you just hit ingest and that will bring all of the photos into photo mechanic and if you click on info you can see that every raw file that's coming in from your camera is complete with that metadata already so if you found the video helpful please let me know drop a comment down below or if you have any questions at all about metadata i know there's a lot to unpack here make sure you drop it as a comment down below i'm happy to answer any questions you guys have if not give the video a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel we've got a lot more content coming at you guys in the next few weeks and i know next time you're in the grocery store you're going to be thinking about this metadata is going to be haunting you in the grocery store see you guys you

Channel: Billie Weiss

Views: 10,016

Keywords: Billie Weiss, Photography, Billie Weiss Photography, Photo Tips, Photo Tricks, Photography Tips, Photography Tricks, Learn Photography, Sports Photography, Sports Photography Tips, Sports Photography Tricks, Metadata, Add Metadata To Photos, How To, Add Captions To Photos, Add Keywords To Photos, Add Metadata To Images, Photo Mechanic, How To Use Photo Mechanic, Add Metadata Photo Mechanic, Apply Metadata To Photos, Apply Caption to Photos, Workflow, Organize, Organize Photos

Id: bD5R6ni6pFA

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021