2 comments

  1. Simon Knight says:

    Interesting video and web page thank you for creating and publishing it.

    I take photos for my own use and have decided that my collection needs some TLC. I am trialing Photo Mechanic at the moment and have found all your videos very helpful. Most of my images have keywords but these keywords are in a mess – yes I typed most of them in free hand so they are full of typos and spelling mistakes.

    I’m hoping to pare the keywords down but wonder where certain information should be saved. For example where should the name of the people in the photo be placed. Looking at your videos it seems that the caption/description might be as good as any other. I have a similar question about the location of the shoot, again this could go in the caption/description as per the hockey shoot but I do see that there are two sets of meta data blocks displayed in Photo Mechanic dedicated to capturing the location in fine detail. Although probably not as fine as a ///What3Words location. I guess I’m asking is there any sort of standard that amateur photographers are advised to follow or is it just a case of doing what works for me?

    I’ll close now as I want to find your video on bulk captions.

    Best wishes and thanks,

    Simon

    • Carl Seibert says:

      Hi Simon,

      Yes, the caption is the “right” place for information about what’s in the photo. You can be all fancy and go full AP Style or not, per your taste and circumstances. Generally, I think of the keywords as “helper” information. Words that might be search terms one day that don’t fit in the caption for one reason or another, categories or types of pictures, taxonomical information, synonyms. Stuff like that. If there’s duplication between the caption and the keywords – no problem. You don’t want extraneous keywords that will make a picture return on a reach that it doesn’t fit. But duplication doesn’t hurt.

      The caption is the field that’s most likely to be seen by some random person in the future. You can’t count on people seeing keywords. (And, on the other hand, you can’t count on keywords being accurate identifying information. See my post about the postage stamp 🙂

      I use the legacy location fields: Country and Country Code, State or Province, and City. For the same reason. Those are the ones used on hundreds of millions of pictures every year. They are the ones most likely to be seen down the road. The new fields are fine, but to me they’re optional.

      Cheers.

      -Carl

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