A South African photographer is suing an agency of the South African government for copyright infringement. He is seeking a breath-taking 2.1 B-i-l-l-i-o-n Rand in damages. (I’m sorry. I can’t even type that number with a steady hand.) That’s north of $180,000,000 in US dollars.
So you run a website and you read my post about the Jessica Simpson lawsuit and destruction of copyright management information. Now you’re thinking about how not destroying metadata would help, well, everybody. True enough. You can protect your contributors, reduce pollution on the web, make assets easier to manage and, just maybe, prevent a nasty lawsuit by preserving metadata (and CMI).
This post is Part 2 of our HOW-TO for keywording in Photo Mechanic. (See Part 1 here.) In this installment, we explore hierarchical keywording, or "Structured Keywording" as Photo Mechanic calls it. Hierarchical keywording allows us to add all the keywords along a hierarchical path by double-clicking on a single keyword, which we will find in a, yes, hierarchical organization.
Not only does hierarchical/Structured keywording allow us to quickly apply keywords, it also allows those of us who need giant keyword vocabularies to manage big keyword lists without any major loss of sanity.
Photo Mechanic is a powerful keywording tool; we’ll learn how in two HOW-Tos
Now that we have a plan in place for our keywording strategy (see this post), we can dive in and actually keyword some pictures. This post is the first of two HOW-TOs on keywording in Photo Mechanic. (I’ll look at keywording in other software in future posts.) There are nearly a dozen ways to apply keywords in Photo Mechanic. In this post, we’ll look at the “flat” methods. In Part 2, we’ll tackle hierarchical, or, in Photo Mechanic terms, “structured” keywording.
Let’s keyword
With a photo selected in Photo Mechanic, simply call the IPTC Editor dialog with the “i” button or the “I” key on your keyboard.
Go to the Keywords field and type in a keyword, then a comma, a space, and another keyword. And so forth. EXCEPT DON’T DO THAT! Remember that we should avoid – if at all possible – typing keywords. We need keywords to be consistent – no typos, no variations, no misspellings. We want to choose keywords.
So, go to the triangle to the right of the keywords field and click. With some luck, you’ll see a flyout with keywords listed, and you can choose one, open the flyout again, choose another, and so on. Your chosen keywords will appear in the Keywords field, neatly separated with commas.
But we’ve probably gotten ahead of ourselves. How do your keywords find their way into that flyout? Read on.
From the flyout, choose “Edit Keywords”. That will open the Edit Keywords dialog. (Photo Mechanic’s legend on the dialog says “IPTC Keywords”, but we’re going to call it “Edit Keywords” because that’s what it does and that’s how we called it.)
The Edit Keywords dialog has two panes. The pane on the right is called the “Master Keywords List”. The keywords in this list are the keywords that appear in the flyout in the IPTC editor. Put keywords in this list, OK the dialog and those keywords will be your flyout keywords.
Don’t read too much into “Master Keywords List”. This isn’t your for-real master list of keywords, your controlled vocabulary that you’ve been working on since your visit to my last post. This list of keywords can’t be much longer than a dozen or two items. This is a topical keyword list. You’ll want to have separate “Master Keywords Lists” for different subjects or situations, like portraits or landscapes, or for certain clients, or even for specific assignments.
That brings us to…..Snapshots
Look below the Master Keywords List. You’ll see editing functions. Their use is obvious. They work the same way in all the Photo Mechanic dialogs that work with lists.
Just below that, you’ll find two – Two! – Snapshot buttons. (Lightning bolt icons) As far as I know, this is the only dialog in Photo Mechanic that has two Snapshot buttons. The one on the right saves and calls Snapshots for the Master Keywords List. So, if you save subsets of your keyword vocabulary as Snapshots here, you can simply switch snapshots to bring up the correct set of keywords for your flyout(s).
At this point, you may be feeling a little uncomfortable about all your work that you’ll be saving as Snapshots. You don’t need to worry.
Option-click (Alt-click on Windows) on any snapshot. (I sometimes have to do this twice. Just a glitch, maybe.) Photo Mechanic will open a file manager window at the folder for Snapshots for whatever dialog you may be using. You’ll see that the Snapshots are stored on disk as .SNAP files. You can copy, backup, migrate or share the .SNAP files to your heart’s content.
You can also simply navigate to the folder in your operating system’s file manager. If a Snapshot flyout gets crowded, you can temporarily move Snapshots and store them elsewhere on your hard drive. (Snapshots can be exported and imported through the settings Import/Export function in Photo Mechanic’s preferences, too.)
And on the left
Take a look at the pane on the left of the dialog, the “Current Keywords List”. This pane will populate with the keywords on the selected image. You can select keywords in the right pane and copy them over to the left pane. Then, when you OK the dialog, those keywords will be applied to the picture you’re working on. In this way, you can apply a bunch of keywords, even from different Snapshots, to a picture, in a heartbeat.
The Snapshot button on the left controls Snapshots for the Current Keywords List. With it, you can make Snapshots of complicated sets of keywords to apply to specific pictures.
Now let’s put this all together
Knowing what we now know, we can work our way back to the beginning to make our flyout list work the way we want it to. But we should go a few steps further to ensure we abide by our controlled vocabulary.
There are Import and Export buttons in the Edit Keywords dialog. These will export your Master Keywords List to a text file, and import a text file into the Master Keywords List (replacing whatever is in it).
If you export and look at the file, you’ll see that it’s just a flat text file with a list of keywords, each on its own line. You can easily make up such a list and import it to the Master Keywords List and, in turn, make that into a Snapshot.
If you import a large-ish list, you can then select some keywords from it in the right pane, copy them to the left pane in the dialog (which you may have to clear for the occasion), then clear the right pane and copy the keywords back. Make a Snapshot. You’ve just made a ready-to-use keywords set for your flyout out. It’s a subset of the list you started with. That list you started with would be…. your controlled vocabulary! So, the flyout list you just made conforms to your controlled vocabulary!
Format your list
It’s quite likely that your controlled vocabulary will be in the form of a hierarchical keyword list. Such a list, if it’s formatted for Photo Mechanic, will be formatted with tabs and the occasional bracket. It’s logical that you would have to use a text editor to edit (a copy of) the list to match the simple format of the Edit Keywords dialog. But wait! You can automate some of the text-editing work and Photo Mechanic will automate most of the rest.
Open your hierarchical list in a text editor. Don’t worry about the tabs. Photo Mechanic will take care of those. You’ll see some keywords in curly brackets. Those are synonyms in the hierarchical list. You can use the Find and Replace function in your text editor to remove the brakets. First, zap the left curly bracket. The do the right one. Poof! That’s done.
I would go ahead and save the file and import it into the dialog at this point. Now, in your Master Keywords List pane, you might see some items in regular brackets. Those are categories, or labels. They show in the Structured Keywords dialog, but they aren’t applied to images. You might want to turn them into keywords, or you might want to delete them. Either way, it’s easy to do using the edit function in the Master Keywords pane.
You might see duplicate items in your list. If so, Multi-select the entire list and copy it over to the left pane. Zap! The dupes are gone. Clear the right-hand pane, multi-select everything in the left pane and copy back to the right. Now you have a perfectly clean list, ready to work with.
(I demonstrate all this in the video version of this post. It might be easier to follow watching, instead of reading.)
Apply with the Stationery Pad
Now, open your Stationery Pad. (CMD+I/CTL+I, or use Image > Stationery Pad from the main menu) In the keywords field, you’ll see that you have the same tools that you have in the IPTC editor. That means you can apply anything you can do with the flyout or Edit Keywords to a Stationery template.
Adding keywords to a template and then applying the template is pretty straightforward. But what if you want to work with keywords on a batch of pictures after you’re done with your other metadata work?
Click “Clear” to clear your Stationery pad. Now tick the tickbox next to the keywords field. That will turn the Keywords field “on” and every other field “off” Now you can apply keywords to selected pictures without affecting any other fields.
Notice the little plus sign by the keywords field. There’s a tickbox next to it. This little gizmo turns append on and off for the keywords field. Usually, when you work with keywords, you’ll want to append. You’ll want to be able to add keywords to any that already exist in the Keywords field. Generally, you want to make sure the append tickbox is ticked.
But if you want a do-over, you can clear the keywords field on images by simply leaving it blank in the Stationery pad, and overwriting whatever might be in the field on the pictures. In which case, unticking the append tickbox will do the trick.
And yet another powerful method
What if you just want to apply some keywords to a bunch of selected images directly, without fussing with the Stationery pad at all?
CMD+K/CTL+K will open something called the Keywords Panel. (You can also find this panel in the Image menu.) The Keywords Panel looks sort of like the Edit Keywords dialog, except it is arranged vertically instead of horizontally. The top of the panel is a pane that looks like the Master Keywords List pane in the Edit Keywords dialog. It will, in fact, display the selected Master Keywords List. There is the same editing functionality. And a Snapshot button. This Snapshot button accesses the same set of Snapshots that the one in Edit Keywords does.
So, you just choose the subset of your controlled vocabulary that you want and you’re good to go in this panel.
Multi-select keywords from the top pane and they will appear in the “Applying:” field at the bottom. “Apply to selected photos” does just that. (You can also type directly in the “Applying:” field. But don’t 🙂 )
There is also a setting pulldown that allows you to choose between append and overwrite behavior for this panel.
These are the “flat” methods for applying keywords in Photo Mechanic. I doubt any given user will use all of them, and I suspect that most readers of this blog will be more interested in the fancier and more powerful Structured Keywords functionality. But most of us will pick and choose one or two of these methods to use when the situation seems right.
Next time, we’ll fire up the Structured Keywords panel, load it with our controlled vocabulary, and have at it.
A few posts along, we’ll explore keywording in Adobe Lightroom. In the meantime, please reach out in the comments.
You can use web-based tools to view metadata on photos. While I doubt that’s earth-shattering news to any of you, a quick Google search on the subject returns breathless posts. “OMG! There’s metadata! Look! See!.” Granted, we have a lot of educating to do if we are to improve the environment in which photos must live online, but it’s a bit over the top. Let’s exhale and see what, if any useful resources we can find here.
If you have captions on your photos, WordPress will place them on your page (or post) along with the pictures. If the details in the caption were correct when the photographer - you or whomever - originally captioned the picture, they’ll be correct on your site. That means less chance to make an error. (And less room for excuses if you do.)
Replace stripped-away metadata on your WordPress server with this quick workaround
If your WordPress hosting provider makes ImageMagick available for your site, that’s good news. It’s good news for metadata. It’s good news for image optimization. It’s just a great day all around.
But what if you’re stuck with GD? Is there a way to fix the metadata damage that library inflicts? Yes. Probably. Maybe. I have a workaround for you. It works for most sites, depending on what sort of access your hosting provider grants.
You’ll need FTP access
If you have FTP access to your site, this will work. Most hosts that I’m familiar with do provide FTP access for self-hosted sites. But your luck may vary. (And since you’re probably reading this because your provider already doesn’t provide ImageMagick, you might want to hold off on buying that lottery ticket.) WordPress.com, by the way, does not support FTP access for its users.
Your hosting provider may have given your FTP credentials when you first opened your account. Or, your FTP details may be somewhere on your account’s homepage. Or, maybe there are instructions in the support documentation. Or, you might have to use your account’s control panel to enable an FTP account. Or, quite likely, you’re already well familiar with all that and you’re just waiting for me to get on with this.
If you’re not familiar with using FTP, there are lots of How-Tos on the web. Just Google “FTP and WordPress”.
What we’re going to do here is FTP to our WordPress server, grab the image files that have been stripped of their metadata, paste the metadata back on and put the files back where we found them.
Download images
Fire up your FTP client. If you need an FTP client, Filezilla is a good one. I use it. And it’s free. But they all work, FTP isn’t brain surgery.
Connect to your WordPress server. Now, your FTP root may be the your home directory, or it may be the web root for your site, or it may be any arbitrary directory that some admin (or you) thought would be good. We’ll assume that it’s your home directory. If it’s your web root, no worries. You’ll just start a click or so closer to your destination.
From your FTP root, navigate to your web root. It will be called something like “public_html”, or “htdocs” or the like. Inside it, you’ll see a bunch of WordPress files and directories, “wp-this or that”.
Find “wp-content” and open it.
Now find “uploads” and open it.
Uploads will (usually) contain subdirectories for each year and then, inside, each month. Navigate into the correct month’s subdirectory.
(You can make a shortcut in your FTP client to save drilling through so many directories.)
Once we have safely arrived in the correct directory, we’ll be looking at our media files. Each image will appear along with several resized copies. (Four, by default)
These resized versions of the image are served to visitors responsively, according to the size of the visitor’s viewport. The original, or full-sized, image is exactly the file that you uploaded to your Media Library. It will have its metadata just as it did when it was on your desktop. The smaller ones, which have dimensions appended to their filenames, were created by your imaging library. If that’s GD and not ImageMagick, these files will stripped of all metadata. We’ll fix that.
Download one or more complete sets of pictures, including the full-sized one(s).
(Don’t worry about interrupting visitors’ access to the images. You’re copying them. The files will be available on your site while you work on them. There will only be a period of a second or so, when we put the files back, when each file wouldn’t be available.)
On your computer, paste back your metadata
Now, you should have the images on your local computer, in whatever folder you chose in your FTP client.
Open that folder (I just use the desktop) in a suitable metadata-editing tool. Photo Mechanic or XnView are good choices. I’m going to use Photo Mechanic.
If you look at your files’ metadata (“I”, or the tooltip in Photo Mechanic), you’ll see that the full-size one has all its metadata in place. The others are stripped clean. We’re going to simply copy the metadata from the full-size image and paste it on the other files.
In Photo Mechanic, the easiest way to is to take an IPTC snapshot of the big image and paste it on the smaller ones. It takes less time than reading this paragraph. See this post for detailed instructions on Photo Mechanic’s various metadata tools.
In XnView, the process is a little different. You’ll open the IPTC panel for the big image, save its metadata to a reusable template, and apply that to the other files. See my post on moving templates between programs for a fuller explanation.
Repeat the process for each set of images you downloaded.
Upload the images again
Now, upload the resized versions of the images right back to where you found them. There’s no need to upload the full-size ones. We didn’t do anything to them. We only copied their metadata. Uploading them would just be a waste of bandwidth.
During your upload, you’ll need to tell your FTP client to overwrite the files on your server with your new, fixed, files. FileZilla has a handy radio button that lets you overwrite all files in your current upload queue. In other FTP clients, You may have to click once per file.
Your repaired images will be exact replacements for the files you downloaded, except for being a few kilobytes bigger and having working metadata.
Test to see that it worked
Now you’ll probably want to go to your website and right-click and download one of your pictures to assure yourself that your work-around-ing did indeed, work. You won’t need to do this next time.
If you put fifty photos on your website whenever you post, fixing your metadata like this could be a fair amount of work. If you’re like me and it’s a half-dozen or so pictures at a time, we’re only looking at a minute or two. It’s just a matter of making it a habit. (Full disclosure: The server on which you’re reading this is ImageMagick-challenged. I haven’t fixed the photos in last week’s post. I’ll take care of them when I post this.)
There you have it. Hopefully, this technique will tide you over until you can get that ImageMagick situation in order. And yes, the technique can be used for other stuff, like running ImageOptim (in lossless mode, please) on your resized files while you have them in front of you. Just be sure not to change the images’ dimensions.
Stay tuned. In future posts, I’ll look at optimizing images for WordPress in a metadata-safe manner, and I’ll do How-Tos for that task in our supported range of software. And, oh yeah, I owe you a metadata How-To for XnView. Dive into the comments and…comment.
It’s a quick task to set up your desktop WordPress server to run ImageMagick
Recent versions of the local desktop WordPress server MAMP come with ImageMagick already installed. If you want to check out ImageMagick on a locally-hosted test site, enabling ImageMagick on MAMP is a one-keystroke process. (Granted, you will make some clicks before and after the keystroke. Just go with me here, folks. How often can you do anything in one-ish keystroke? We’re on course to the quickest How-To ever.)
We’re going to enable the IMagick PHP extension that talks to ImageMagick, by uncommenting a line in PHP’s configuration file.
Go to the MAMP webstart page. (Usually http://localhost:8888/MAMP/ There’s a link in the MAMP interface.)
Click on “phpinfo” in the header of the webstart page.
On the phpinfo page, look at “Loaded Configuration file”. It’s about the seventh item down from the top. There, you see the path to the currently loaded instance of php.ini. For me, it’s “/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php7.1.1/conf/php.ini”.
In Finder, navigate to the folder shown. Find php.ini and open it in your favorite text editor (TextWrangler or Text Edit or whatever you like). Make sure you are in the correct folder, looking at the correct php.ini. There are multiple directories with php.ini’s in MAMP. (By my count, you should be at 11 clicks, no keystrokes, at this point)
In php.ini, scroll down to the line that says:
;extension=imagick.so
It’s about line 540 or so in my php.ini. You might think of just searching for “imagick”, but hold on there. Nobody authorized the expenditure of extra keystrokes!
Uncomment the line by deleting the semicolon (Plunk. There’s your keystroke!) The line will look like so:
extension=imagick.so
Save the file. (From the menu! No keystroke!)
Restart the MAMP servers and you’re done! (15 clicks, counting the one double-click as two. One keystroke.)
Now see if it works; metadata should be preserved
To check to see if it’s working, you can call phpinfo again and scroll down past the table part to the part of the page that’s divided into alphabetically-arranged sections. There should now be a section for IMagick. That tells you that the IMagick extension loaded.
The real, for sure, way to see that ImageMagick is working, is to find a test image that has metadata and upload it to your test site’s Media Library. Then place one of the resized versions of your test image in a post. Then, download the picture from a Preview. Now, look at the downloaded file it in an application that reads metadata. If your metadata is still there, then all is good and ImageMagick is working.
(Note: When you right-click and download your file, you should see dimensions in the filename, like “test_image-300×150.jpg”. The original image won’t have dimensions appended to its filename. The original image hasn’t been touched, so it will still have its metadata, ImageMagick or not.)
Another way to see that metadata is being preserved is to simply point your metadata-reading image browser (Photo Mechanic, Bridge, XnView, at al) at your uploads folder and look at the files. The path on my machine is /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/the_name_of_your_test_site/wp-content/uploads/some_year/some_month/
Not too different on a real server
The procedure to enable ImageMagick isn’t terribly different on a real ImageMagick/IMagick-equipped web server. Consult your hosting provider’s documentation.
Switch off and on
Once you have ImageMagick working, you can turn it off again by commenting that line in php.ini. Just put the semicolon back.
Experiment with image quality
With your on-and-off switchable ImageMagick installation working, you can experiment with how ImageMagick handles compression of your images, compared to GD. Every image responds somewhat differently to the JPEG process, so this is your-mileage-may-vary territory, but many people report both better image quality and smaller files with ImageMagick.
I’ll do a future post listing hosting providers that support ImageMagick. If you have a good or bad ImageMagick hosting experience, please let me know!
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.
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.
Use the Stationery Pad to apply baseline metadata to photos coming into our workflow. Then use the Stationery Pad again to apply information common to all photos in a batch. And finally, use the IPTC Info dialog to apply specific metadata to individual photos.
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.
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.
Move metadata templates between Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, and XnView
In this post, we’ll learn how to import, export and exchange metadata templates between Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop, and XnView.
We can easily import and export metadata templates to and from our image/metadata editing applications. We can send and receive templates from clients, for example, and we can standardize templates between different applications or different computers in our own environments.
Photo Mechanic can import and export .XMP template files.
We can import or export templates in either Photo Mechanic’s IPTC Stationery dialog (CMD or CTL + I) or its per-image IPTC Info metadata editor. (Just the I-key, or the ‘I’ button on a slidemount in the contact sheet view.) Templates and Snapshots are interchangeable between the two tools. For this tutorial, we’re going to use the IPTC Info editor.
Find any old JPEG image in a contact sheet. One that doesn’t have any metadata you care about would be good, but any JPEG will work.
Open the IPTC Info dialog. (‘I’ key, or ‘I’ button on the slidemount).
Click the ‘Clear’ Button to clear the editor.
Click the ‘Load…’ button and navigate to your .XMP template. Click ‘Open’ and the editor will load with the values from the template.
Edit the template to suit your own needs.
Click the Snapshot button (Lower left corner of the dialog. It has a lightning bolt icon) and save a Snapshot of your new template with a descriptive name.
Now you’re good to go. You can call your template from the IPTC Info editor or the IPTC Stationery Pad by clicking on the Snapshot button and choosing it from the flyout list.
To save your new template as a new .XMP file, simply click ‘Save…’ in either the IPTC Info or IPTC Stationery Pad dialogs and choose a filename.
To save your new template as a JPEG template, choose a suitable JPEG file. (It’s probably a good idea to make an image of the words “Template File”, or something to that effect, but a bathroom mirror selfie, or whatever, will do.) Use the IPTC Info dialog to apply your template metadata to that file. You’re done.
In Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom cannot work with .XMP files, so we’ll use a JPEG metadata template.
Import a JPEG with template data embedded. (There’s a sample in my download.)
From the Metadata panel on the right rail in Library view, click on the ‘Presets’ flyout and, from the bottom, choose ‘Edit Presets’. Or, you can choose ‘Edit Metadata Presets…’ from the ‘Metadata’ pulldown in the main menu.
The Edit Presets dialog should populate with the values from your imported template. Edit to suit your needs.
From the ‘Preset:’ flyout at the top of the dialog, choose ‘Save current settings as preset’ from the bottom of the list.
Choose a suitable name and save.
You’re done. Now your new preset (template) will be available in the ‘Presets’ flyout in the metadata panel and anywhere else in Lightroom where you might need it, like the Import dialog.
To save your preset back to another JPEG file to share it with another Lightroom user or move it to another program, find or import a JPEG, and apply your template to it.
With the file selected, go to the ‘Metadata’ pulldown in the main menu and choose ‘Save Metadata to File’ to write your metadata to the file. That’s it. You’re done. That file is now usable as a metadata template file.
In Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge can import and export .XMP template files.
If you don’t need to edit the template you are importing, you can simply drag in the template file.
Select any image file in the browser, and choose ‘File Info’ from the ‘File’ pulldown on them main menu.
In the File Info dialog, click on the presets flyout in the middle of the bottom of the dialog, and choose ‘Show Templates Folder’. An operating system file manager window showing your templates folder will open.
Drag your .XMP template file into the folder.
You’re done. The template will now appear in the ‘Append Metadata’ or ‘Replace Metadata’ submenus under the ‘Tools’ main menu pulldown, or in the Edit Presets dialog.
If you do need to edit your template, click ‘Import’ instead of ‘Show Templates Folder’ from the File Info dialog.
Choose ‘Clear existing properties…’ from the ensuing dialog.
Navigate to your .XMP template file, select it and click ‘Load’.
The File Info dialog will be populated with your template values. Edit them to suit.
When you’re satisfied with your edits, choose ‘Export’ from the Presets flyout, and save your new .XMP template file.
If you are working with a JPEG template file (from Lightroom, for example), select your template JPEG file in the browser and go to the ‘Tools’ pulldown in the main menu and choose ‘Create Metadata Template’.
The Create Metadata Template editor appears, with values from your template filled in. Edit to suit your needs.
On the left side of the Create Metadata Template dialog, there are tickboxes, on for each field. Tick the tickboxes for every field that you want to be active in your template. Usually, that will be all of them that have values filled in except ‘Date Created’, which varies from picture to picture and is thus useless in a template.
Fill in a name for your template, click ‘Save’ and you’re done.
To save a new JPEG template file, make a JPEG file as described in the Photo Mechanic section above, and apply your template to it.
In Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop won’t likely be your go-to metadata authoring application, but it’s handy to have your templates available in Photoshop.
In Photoshop, open or use CMD/CTL+N to create an image file.
From the ‘File’ Pulldown on the main menu, choose ‘File Info’.
The File Info dialog in Photoshop looks different from the Bridge version, but for templates purposes, it works the same way. Follow the instructions for importing and exporting .XMP template files in the Bridge section above.
To export a JPEG template file, simply make a new document with CMD/CTL+N, decorate it to taste, apply your metadata template information to it, and save it as a JPEG.
In XnView
XnView is a low-cost image browser program that can edit metadata. It’s actually my favorite for removing metadata, but it does a decent job of writing it, too. (With some limitations)
Metadata aside, everybody should have a copy in XnView because it does a great job of opening mysterious or damaged image files. It can handle over 500 file types. XnView is free for personal use and costs only about €30 for commercial use.
XnView is free for personal use and costs only about €30 for commercial use.
XnView cannot import and export .XMP templates. So, we’ll use a JPEG template. (And yes, if you skipped to this section, there is one in my starter kit. A download link appears close to the top of this post.)
Open the folder containing your JPEG template file in the XnView browser and select the file.
The IPTC editor will open filled with the values from your template, displayed in various tabs.
Edit your template values to suit.
Click the ‘Save template…’ button on the right side of the dialog. A ‘Choose Template’ dialog appears, with the space for a name highlighted.
Simply type a name for your template in the space provided, and click ‘OK’.
You’re done.
You can call your template with the ‘Load template’ button right under the one you used to save it.
To make a JPEG template file, in XnView, the procedure is the same as it is in Bridge. Make a JPEG, apply your template to it and that’s it.
Note that you can overwrite the name of a template in the choose template dialog. That’s a little bit dangerous, but it can also be very handy if you want to make a temporary template and change its values repeatedly. In this way, you can more or less replicate the functionality of the ‘IPTC Snapshot’ function in Photo Mechanic, or the ‘Sync’ function in Lightroom.
I mentioned that XnView can work with IPTC metadata “with some limitations”. Here’s the rub: XnView can only write core IPTC metadata.
It can’t write any of the extended IPTC fields that are stored only in the XMP data. That includes the contact fields, right fields, and Rights/Usage Information. That’s not as bad a handicap as it might seem because legacy applications can’t read the extended fields anyway.
That’s not as bad a handicap as it might seem because legacy applications can’t read the extended fields anyway.
We already plan for that and we design our metadata accordingly, not just if we are working with XnView, but always. So this isn’t a show-stopper. (As long as your contact information appears in the Copyright field, and your caption contains any information that’s really vital, you should be OK.)
XnView DOES write a copy of the core IPTC metadata in the XMP data, as expected by modern programs. And it can read the extended fields. A file written by XnView should be compatible with future programs that might not be able to read the old IPTC/IIM data, and you shouldn’t have to worry about it making files where the two instances of the IPTC data are out of sync.
Comments? Questions? Requests? Comment below.
Look for How-Tos on working with metadata in Bridge, XnView, and Photoshop right here in the coming weeks.