Photo Mechanic is a powerful metadata editing tool

Photo Mechanic is the high-power tool of metadata editing and photo selection. If you’re a woodworker, it would be the Festool track saw. If you’re a photographer, the Nikon D5 or Canon EOS 1D would pop to mind. While it’s not expensive for what you get, it does cost some money. What you get for your money is a program that does what professionals need it to do, is stable, and gets its part of the job done with the minimum expenditure of sweat from your brow. This thing is the real deal.

Photo Mechanic makes quick work of dealing with metadata. It does a lot with metadata. And it does a whole lot of other stuff, too. I could write three-thousand-word posts every week for a month or two to cover everything this program can do.

In this post, we’ll look only at its metadata functionality and assume that you already know how to edit photos with the program. We’ll also leave customizing Photo Mechanic and using it for optimizing images for the web (and maybe more) for future posts.

We’re going to look at the basic metadata functions in Photo Mechanic first. Then we’ll use what we’ve learned to build an efficient workflow.  Finally, we’ll tour some really advanced metadata functionality.

 

Watch a video version of this How-To

Short on time? This short demonstration video serves as an introduction to Photo Mechanic

Simple metadata editing, one picture at a time

If you open a folder of photos in a “Contact Sheet”, which is Photo Mechanic-speak for a thumbnail browser, you’ll see an ‘i’ button at the lower left of each photo’s slide mount. Click it (or press the ‘I’ key) and the IPTC Info dialog opens. The IPTC Info dialog is Photo Mechanic’s one-at-a-time metadata editing tool. It’s what you would use to read metadata from a photo or add metadata to a single photo.

At its most basic, this dialog has fields for metadata. You fill them in and click ‘OK’ to apply them to the selected photo. Metadata is applied losslessly. The image is not disturbed when metadata is edited.

But we don’t want to just fill out the fields by hand. Ever. We should always start with a template that contains all our standing information. We don’t want to type all that stuff in because, for one thing, we don’t want to type all that stuff in. The more important reason is that we need for standing metadata to be consistent across thousands or hundreds of thousands of files. If we type it by hand every time it won’t be. Trust me on this.

Working with templates

We need to use a template. To make a metadata template in Photo Mechanic, we can carefully fill in the relevant fields in the IPTC Info dialog and make what Photo Mechanic calls a Snapshot. There is a button with a lightning bolt icon at the lower left in most Photo Mechanic dialogs.

That’s the Snapshot button. Click it and a flyout appears. It lists available Snapshots (Templates, in this case). To save a new Snapshot, choose ‘Save’ and name your template. To call a template, choose one from the Snapshot flyout and the template loads into the dialog.

You can delete a Snapshot/template by holding down the Option key (on a Mac) or Shift key (On a PC) while clicking a Snapshot in the flyout, and an operating system file manager window opens. From there, you can delete a Snapshot, or copy it to share it with another Photo Mechanic user.

(Note: Photo Mechanic allows you to export and import complete sets of preferences so that you can synchronize installations across multiple computers. Snapshots can be exported with all the other prefs in one combined file. That’s a big feature for studios or companies with many users.)

Another way to make a template is to import the template as an XMP file. There are buttons on the IPTC Info dialog that allow you to load or save XMP template files, which can be exchanged with other programs that understand .XMP files, like Adobe Bridge and Photoshop. You can also exchange templates with programs that can’t understand .XMP files, like Adobe Lightroom and XnView, by exporting and importing metadata on JPEG files. See this post for detailed instructions.

 

You can download a starter metadata template, which you can edit to suit your own needs here..

Navigate quickly between photos

In the IPTC Info dialog, when you are ready to apply metadata to a photo, you could click ‘OK’ and close the dialog, or you could use the navigation buttons under the thumbnail at the upper right in the dialog. These allow you to save metadata to a picture and move forward or back to the next picture, or simply to move without saving. In this set of buttons, there are copy and paste buttons that allow you to copy metadata from one picture to another. You can save metadata to a picture and go straight to the File Uploader dialog from another button in this group.

The escape key closes the dialog. (And most others in Photo Mechanic.)

There are a few more buttons, but we’ll talk about them as we look at IPTC Info’s big brother, the IPTC Stationery Pad, because they’re common to both dialogs.

Some workflows are one photo at a time, but in most cases, the IPTC Info dialog would be used in a second or third pass through the pictures, to add final per-photo information to just a couple of fields.

IPTC Stationery Pad

From anywhere in Photo Mechanic you call the IPTC Stationery Pad with Cmd/CTL+I, or from the Image pulldown in the main menu.

IPTC Stationery Pad is Photo Mechanic’s tool for applying metadata, or changing metadata, in bulk. Like the IPTC Info dialog, the Stationery Pad has the various metadata fields, in which you can enter or edit

metadata. The StationeryPad broadcasts metadata to groups of photos. Fill in the fields and press the ‘Apply stationery to Selected’ button and your metadata will be applied to any selected photos. Or you could close the stationery pad and select photos, right-click on one of them, and choose ‘Apply IPTC stationery’ from the context menu to apply the stationery. The Stationery Pad doesn’t need to be open to work. As long as it’s loaded with metadata it’s active and ready to go.

You’ll notice that each field in the Stationery Pad has a tickbox next to it. The tickbox is checked automatically if there is a value in the corresponding field. Fields with a selected tickbox are active and will overwrite any metadata that might exist in those fields on a target photo. A ‘ticked’ but blank field will erase the contents of that field on a target photo.

Add additional metadata to the caption

Now notice that the Caption field has a flyout menu with choices for ‘Replace’, ‘Prefix’ and ‘Append’. Depending on what you choose in this flyout, the Stationery Pad will prepend, overwrite, or append data in the Caption field of target photos. The Caption Writer and Keywords fields have ‘+’ tickboxes. Those allow the contents of those fields to be appended to corresponding fields on target photos.

Typically, we use appending or prepending on our second pass through our photos. First, we broadcast baseline metadata to all the photos in a given batch. Then, we add caption information and keywords that may be common to all the photos in the batch by clearing the Stationery Pad, adding the new information, choosing to prepend or append as appropriate, and applying the Stationery Pad.

The Stationery Pad has a Snapshot button and from it, we can choose and save templates. Templates are interchangeable between the stationery pad and the IPTC Info dialog, as are XMP template files.

Variables in Photo Mechanic

On the bottom of the Stationery Pad, there is a ‘Variables…’ button. Variables are codes that can be replaced with values that you define. If you put a variable for GPS Latitude in, say, a picture’s caption, Photo Mechanic will find the Latitude for that picture and write it where the variable was.

If you click the ‘Variables…’ button, a menu will appear with variables available in Photo Mechanic. Place your cursor where you want the variable to appear, go back to the menu and double-click a variable and that variable will be inserted. You can also simply type or copy and paste. Once you apply your metadata to a picture, any variables will be replaced with the appropriate values. You can build whole sentences peppered with variables. It’s like the mail merge feature in an office program.

Variables work the same way in IPTC Info and, indeed, several other dialogs in Photo Mechanic.

Another button found in both the IPTC Info dialog and the Stationery Pad is the ‘Job…’ button. ‘Job…’ Opens a dialog where you can enter contact information for clients and photographers (although you could enter this information for anybody.) Snapshots in this dialog allow you to build an address book. Each field in the ‘Job…’ the dialog is associated with a variable. If you load a certain client’s, or photographer’s info in the Job dialog, then the corresponding variables can be placed to apply that information anywhere you choose. You could easily build a template that would create, for example, a customized Rights Usage Terms statement granting a license to whatever client you select in Jobs.

The ‘Sequence…’ button allows you set the starting number for the sequence variable. The sequence variable is often used to rename files with incrementing numbers in the file name, like “01wedding.jpg; 02wedding.jpg; 03wedddng.jpg”. But it can be used anywhere you want a number that increments from picture to picture, “…photo {sequence} of 17”, in the captions of a seventeen-picture gallery, for example.

How do we apply baseline metadata to many photos?

Most workflows start with photos on a camera memory card. The first order of business is to copy either all your photos or a select edit of photos from the card to your computer. In Photo Mechanic, you’ll either do that by copying or ingesting.

Copying

If you copy, you’ll start with thumbnails of the pictures on your card open in a Photo Mechanic Contact Sheet, or thumbnail browser tab. You’ll select the photos you want to copy to your computer and press ‘CMD/CTL+Y’ (or select ‘Copy To’ from the File menu) to open the copy dialog. Right near the top of the copy dialog, there

is a tickbox that allows you to ‘Apply IPTC Stationery to copied photos’. Tick this and we can apply baseline metadata to photos even as we copy them to our computer. There is a button that opens the IPTC Stationery Pad.

From the Stationery Pad’s Snapshot flyout, choose a Snapshot (template) and it will load into the Stationery Pad. We can now close the Stationery Pad. It’s loaded with the metadata from the template we just chose.  Now we choose our other copy options and click ‘Copy’. While our photos are being copied, our metadata template is being applied. Photo Mechanic will embed metadata in files that accept embedded metadata and it will make sidecar files for file formats that don’t work with embedded metadata. (Many RAW files, for example.)

Ingesting

The other method for copying files from a camera card to your computer is called “Ingest”. Go to ‘File > Ingest’ to open the ingest dialog. Ingesting copies all the photos on a card, or newly added ones, from the card – or “disk”, if you’re old school by digital standards, and learned when camera cards were actually miniature spinning hard drives. In the Ingest dialog, we have another ‘Apply-IPTC-stationery’ tickbox.

This time, we have radio buttons that allow us to choose between “Local” and “Global” IPTC stationery. “Global” IPTC stationery means whatever metadata we have loaded into our Stationery Pad, just like when we copied pictures from the card to the computer.

“Local” IPTC stationery means IPTC stationery that was loaded on the pad when a Snapshot of the Ingest dialog was made. The Snapshot button in the lower left corner of the Ingest dialog will make such a Snapshot.

Snapshots are like presets. They record the condition of the entire dialog. Thus, by using this “Local” feature, we can make Ingest Snapshots that include specific metadata. We can assign different sets of metadata to different batches of photos in just one click, without having to even open the Stationery Pad. Use this feature for batches of photos from different photographers, or for different clients, for example.

IPTC Snapshot

Another way to copy metadata to one or many photos is IPTC Snapshot. Right-click on a photo. You’ll see ‘IPTC Snapshot’, with a flyout arrow that allows you to ‘Take’ or ‘Paste’. IPTC Snapshot one photo and paste its metadata to as many selected pictures as you want.

You might not want to add baseline metadata to every photo. There are perfectly logical reasons why this might be. In this case, simply copy photos to your computer, sans metadata, then select the ones you want to add metadata to, and use the Stationery Pad.

Generally, in the Copy and Ingest dialogs, we would use the Stationery Pad to apply baseline metadata to photos coming into our workflow. Then we would use the Stationery Pad again to apply information common to all photos in a batch. And finally, we would use the IPTC Info dialog to apply specific metadata to individual photos.

Save Photos As…

If you look in the right-click context menu from any photo in Photo Mechanic, you see ‘FTP as…’ and ‘Save Photos as…’ items.

 

‘Save Photos as…’ opens a dialog where we can save copies of our photos transformed in a variety of ways. They can be resized, have crops applied, be compressed, or renamed, among other things. This dialog also has an ‘Apply stationery’ feature, with a button to open the Stationery Pad. Like the copy dialog, in this one, we can only use the active data that’s currently loaded on the Stationery Pad.

FTP As…

‘FTP as..’ is equipped the same way. (‘FTP as’ is a bit of a misnomer, by the way. From this dialog, you can send photos to a number of specialized destinations, like PhotoShelter and Zenfolio, that are not ordinary FTP servers.)

In these output dialogs, we would normally by using the Stationery Pad to apply tweaks, like licenses, or embargoes, to existing metadata.

More metadata functions in Photo Mechanic

The Tools main menu pulldown includes several metadata functions. From this pulldown, you can do housekeeping tasks to your metadata such as choosing its text encoding or synchronizing IPTC metadata in the IPTC IIM Area of your file and the XMP area of your file.

Delete metadata

From the Tools pulldown, you can choose ‘Delete Metadata’. You would use this dialog if you were working on copies of photos from which you need to redact metadata for one reason or another. See this post for a discussion on when stripping metadata from a photo might be appropriate.

In this dialogue, choose categories of metadata that will be removed from your photo. Often, you would leave untouched the IPTC and XMP metadata (where the most often used copy of the IPTC information lives) and remove everything else. Notice the warning that cautions that this operation is permanent and should be used only on duplicate photos, never on originals that you want to keep. Good advice. Heed it

Adjust Capture Dates and Times

Another powerful dialog that is available from the Tools menu is ‘Adjust Capture Dates and Times’. This dialogue allows you to adjust the capture time of a photo and write the new information to Exif metadata, IPTC metadata, or to files’ own modification dates and times.

This dialogue is usually used to synchronize time data between different cameras. Photos of a running clock such as the game clock at a sports event or even your watch can be used with this dialogue to precisely synchronize capture times of photos. Most often this is used to order the photos in chronological order in the contact sheet view. It can also be used to correct if the camera’s clock is just plain wrong.

The inline information button in this dialogue is extremely helpful. (Most of Photo Mechanic’s Help documentation is excellent, by the way.)

From the Settings flyout of the Edit menu, you can access the settings for several text and variable-related functions. Of particular interest to metadata users are the ‘Code Replacements’ item and the ‘Auto-Complete’ item.

Code Relacements

Code Replacements allow you to define codes what you can type in your metadata and then that code will be replaced with any text you desire.

If your workflow requires you to repeatedly use phrases that are difficult to type or difficult to spell this feature can be a significant timesaver. For example, if you often need to type “Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Republican), California,” you might quickly learn to love this feature. Program Photo Mechanic to replace “\guv\” with that phrase.

The use of code replacements is explained in detail in the Camera Bits Wiki.

Auto Complete

‘Auto Complete’ is exactly that. Photo Mechanic allows you to set your own type-ahead auto-complete values. This could be helpful for example if your company’s CEO has a particularly difficult to spell or type name.

Set Info Text

 

The ‘Set Info Text’ dialogue allows you to configure what information from the metadata is shown in the one-up preview in Photo Mechanic and in tooltips (View > ‘Show Info Tooltips’, or Shift+CMD/CTL+T, or from the right-click context menu) For example, you could add file dimensions to the display, as I did, or you could show the caption or other IPTC fields. By default, Exif data is shown, but you can choose variables to show any metadata.

Printing metadata

Let’s say you need to reveal metadata to users who do not have a metadata reading

application installed on their computer. There are two functions in photo mechanic that allow you to do this elegantly.

 

Photo Mechanic’s print dialogue allows you to use variables to include metadata fields as legends under pictures printed either one up or as a contact sheet. You may, of course, print such a contact sheet either to paper or to a PDF.

Export text files of metadata

From the File menu, choose ‘Export’ to open the Exporter dialog. Then from the flyout menu on the left side of the dialogue choose ‘Text Exporter’. This function allows you to export text from any metadata field into a text file. You can add header and footer text and simple ASCII formatting. You can even make tab delimited output for use in spreadsheets or print publishing programs.

This function can make readme files containing caption information. You could post them with photos in file sharing environments such as Dropbox, Google Drive or an FTP share.

The best way to learn to use this function is to simply select a group of photos and experiment in the Text Exporter dialogue until you’re satisfied with the way your exported text file looks.

Ratings and labels

Photo Mechanic’s star ratings and color labels are, strictly speaking, metadata. They can be shared between Photo Mechanic and the Adobe Creative Cloud applications, and XnView.

Stars are automatically shareable. Star ratings in any of the programs will appear in any of the others.

Color labels can be synchronized between Photo Mechanic, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Lightroom, and XnView. In order to do so, you will have to modify preferences in Photo Mechanic. In a separate post, I will explain the process in detail.

 

There’s a lot of power in Photo Mechanic. And a lot of detail. And a long post. In the coming weeks, after my typing fingers recover, I’ll round out our tour of application How-Tos with a post on using XnView to work with metadata. Future How-To posts will include optimizing photos for use on the web (especially for WordPress) in Photo Mechanic, XnView, and Lightroom.

In the meantime, please help me correct any errors I have made by posting in the comments.