What are keywords? Why do you want them? Why is there air? Keywording is probably the trickiest wicket in the whole metadata game. Your keywording regime requires more forethought than most any other component of your workflow.
A good keywording approach depends heavily on a specific understanding of your collection, your searching needs, and the capabilities of your archive system.
There are lots of shades of gray here. Keywording can be controversial.
Users discover that their iPhones are using AI image recognition technology to tag their pictures. Of their underwear. Gasp! A ripple on the internet ensues. But for real, can machine learning image recognition be useful? After some snarkiness, we take a look.
OK. So what, exactly, is it that I want you to do about this metadata thing?
If you give birth to photographs – label them properly with a caption, copyright notice, and some contact information before you send them out into the world.
If you operate the means of publishing or distributing pictures, or if you’re just a cog in a great machine that does that, read the label to be sure you know what’s what and that you have rights to publish whatever it is before you publish.
If you run a website, make sure your server doesn’t strip the metadata labels, also known as Copyright Management Information, off of works that are published or distributed on your site.
What do I (you) get out of it?
If you’re a photographer, you get the warm and fuzzy of knowing that your work has a fighting chance of surviving. Maybe, years from now, somebody will look at that picture, understand what it is about, and who you are. Maybe that somebody calls you up to buy a license instead of stealing your work. (Or to ask your permission to use it, even.) Heavens to legacy.
In your own life, it means that when you have 50,000, or 500,000, or a million photos in your collection, you’ll be able to find the one you’re thinking of without spending hours or days looking for it.
…the balance of karma around you will improve. Your life will be a little better. The business environment in your segment will be a little better.
If you’re licensing your work to the future through Creative Commons or some similar means, it means that, well, that will actually work. Your work won’t just go in the dustbin after one use. Your name, the license information, and supporting data will be right there in the metadata and your work can be used again and again.
If you’re a publisher, metadata on a photo gives you the opportunity to be an honest person. (Without having to break your back about it.) That doesn’t suck. You know that you really do have rights to use that photo. You know for sure who’s in the photo.
You’re preserving culture
By not removing that copyright information, you’ll be following the law. The new, disruptive, novel, one-weird-trick way to not get sued in the intellectual property biz is to follow the copyright law. (A bold strategy if there ever was one. We should make up an acronym for it.) It’s an easy warm and fuzzy. Taking one more threat that might destroy your business, even if it isn’t a statistically huge threat, off the table is a good thing in my book any day. See this post.
And, if you have zillions of assets, you’ll be able to find the one you want, too.
How do you accomplish all this goodness?
Photographer:
Labeling your work with metadata is usually a two-step process.
Your copyright and contact information goes on your pictures automatically (All, or just the ones you might publish, or some that will serve as “signposts” when you are searching through your collection. It depends.) Depending on what software you use, templated information like that goes on your picture when you download them from your camera cards all by itself, or it might take a couple clicks and a few seconds for each batch of photos. (Look around this site for software recommendations and instructions, metadata explainers, and even downloadable starter templates. )
Then, it will take (a little) effort to caption and keyword your final selections. Maybe a minute for each published photo.
(Read what the copyright office has to say about registering copyrights. It’s not really a metadata thing, but since we’re here…)
Website operators, or agencies, or publications:
When a photo comes to you, look at it. Are the rights OK? Does the caption seem to be accurate? It only takes a second (literally) to look.
Insist/encourage photographers, clients and whoever might supply pictures to you to label them properly in the metadata. If – excuse me, when – they don’t, (and some always won’t) mark up the picture yourself. Trust me, you’ll save more time, money and lawsuits than you invest.
Software to do this? Pretty much every creative on the planet has the Adobe suite. Adobe Bridge will get the job done. Not pretty, but done. XnView works great and it’s so cheap it’s ridiculous. One way or the other, you’ve got to look at the picture. It doesn’t really take any extra work to see what the metadata says. See my software articles for specifics.
If you run the backend of a website, make sure your server doesn’t strip away IPTC metadata where all that culturally and legally important information lives. (See this post and this one for more information on how metadata is structured within an image file.)
In the interest of full disclosure: You will pay a small – insignificant, really – price in page load time for the 8 KB or so of metadata that you’re preserving. We’re talking about a millisecond and a half per picture for fixed broadband in the US (2017), and about four milliseconds for mobile devices. By way of comparison, it takes 300 to 400 milliseconds to blink your eye. So – not too bad a bargain.
In WordPress…
If your website runs on WordPress, all you need to do is make sure your server is using ImageMagick (instead of GD) as its imaging library and important metadata will be preserved by default. Most hosting providers support ImageMagick, and many enable it by default. In the latter case, you don’t have to do a darn thing – except choose one of those providers. (In an upcoming post, I’ll publish the first edition of a chart listing providers who support or enable ImageMagick.)
If the provider supports ImageMagick but doesn’t enable it by default, it’s usually just a matter of contacting customer support (it’s chat, usually) and the deed is done in a couple minutes.
If your site is on a different CMS, it’s more or less the same idea. You might have to specify a different imaging library or change the configuration of the one you have. Most big-time industrial CMSes already use ImageMagick as their imaging library. In those cases, we’re probably talking about updating a config file.
Hold the phone
I hear someone in the shadows calling out “What about social media? What about phones? Aren’t those things dominating the media landscape now?”
Sort of. We’re not really talking about throw-away content here. That’s the whole point.
But throw away or not, professional content has to be, well, professional. It’s critically important for facts to be right. We can’t afford to accidentally use the wrong photo, or the photo the social media user didn’t authorize. And the quantities of content in the omnichannel world are staggering. Great metadata, great digital asset management and care and attention to rights and attribution help make the difference between living and dying for people working in a social media world.
Social media tends to strip away metadata. But you still need to keep track your assets. You should make sure every picture you put out there has metadata, regardless. If nothing else, you’ll be better able to keep track of the asset later. That stripped-off-by-the media-company metadata may or may not carry the day in some future legal hassle, but it sure isn’t going to hurt. See this post for more on what metadata needs to be on a photo you release and what metadata shouldn’t be.
By the way, your copyright and byline will survive a round trip through Facebook. Everything else ends up on the cutting room floor.
Social media companies may seem like such behemoths that we can never change their behavior. A little pressure won’t hurt, though.
Make metadata on mobile
As for phones – tons of photos are made with phones today. More and more each day. While most pictures that find their way to publication pass through a computer-based workflow on their way there, some don’t.
Not to worry! There are good metadata authoring apps available for both Android and iPhone. I’ll be writing about the best for each platform soon.
Will doing this really help? Will it make a dent?
Yes. It will help you. It will make the environment around you better. Your life will be better and easier.
I just suggested that publishers and agency people insist that photos they pay for be properly marked up. Poof! In one stroke, most of the pictures on your plate will be find-able and easier to use. You’ll save time and money. Life will be good. (Or better, at least. Your health, your family life – those things metadata probably won’t help.)
Photographers will save back the time and effort of marking up their stuff and then some. And just how many calls offering reuse fees does it take to make your day brighter?
If push one day comes to shove and one day you need to sue a copyright infringer, and that CMI in the metadata makes the difference between a lawyer taking the case and getting a judgment or not, that investment in metadata will make for a happy day.
Good works can go viral
There are trillions of photos floating around out there. In terms of that giant pile, good efforts by you and your friends might not make a statistical dent. But the balance of karma around you will improve. Your life will be a little better. The business environment in your segment will be a little better. That’s better than a dent.
And communities are interconnected. Trends take hold. The content creation and publishing communities are big, no mistake. But if the players in your niche start doing a good thing, it will spread to ever wider and wider circles of influence. Good ideas can spread through whole industries in no time at all.
Have you done something with metadata that we all should feel good about? Dive into the comments. Brighten our day!
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.)
Captions connect pictures to the world. That connection between an image and its subjects, time and place (and its author, too) gives a photo the power to endure. Join your Aunt Louise as we explore the power of the caption.
Last week’s release of new French president Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait, by photographer Soazig de la Moissonnière, caused a stir on Twitter. Metadata on the version of the photo released on the government’s website revealed that somebody had the picture open in Photoshop for some fifteen hours. But vital information was left off the photo.
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.
Adobe Lightroom is one of the most popular photo editing applications on the market. Lightroom differs from some of the other applications we’re going to talk about both in scope and function. Lightroom is a big, sprawling program. It is used to edit photos, to archive your collections, tone photos, build photo books, and as they say, much much more. Lightroom is a good metadata authoring tool, too. That’s good news!
If you don’t already use Lightroom, you probably don’t want to use it as your metadata authoring program. There are simpler ways. If you are a Lightroom user, read on. We’re going to assume here that you already know who to use Lightroom. In this post, we’ll only concentrate on Lightroom’s metadata functionality.
Lightroom is different
Lightroom is database driven. In Lightroom, your original photos always remain untouched. Well, the image part does anyway. When you edit a photo in Lightroom, everything you do to the photo, or maybe I should say “intend to do” is written to Lightroom’s database (as, yes, metadata), and when you export a photo, all the stuff that you “did” actually is done to a new file just before it’s written to disk by the export process.
The only actual change Lightroom makes to your photo files is writing metadata to the files. And it really only does that when we tell it to. Don’t worry, Lightroom writes metadata to files losslessly, just like Photo Mechanic does. Here, we’re talking about both our kind of metadata – captions and copyright information and the like, and Lightroom’s kind of metadata – the recorded information about changes you make to your pictures, like toning, color and whatever. Working in Lightroom is conceptually very different from working with Photoshop and PhotoMechanic, or Bridge, or XnView. In those programs, we work directly on our files.
Let’s add metadata to some files in Lightroom, step by step.
Let’s get a preliminary out of the way. We’re going to need a boilerplate metadata template that we add to all our pictures.
In Lightroom, in the Library module, with any photo selected, go to the right rail and expand the ‘Metadata’ section. Then, from the ‘Presets’ flyout, choose ‘Edit Presets’.
That will bring up a dialog where you can fill in all the fields you want to include in your template. If the picture you have selected already has metadata, fields in the dialog will already be filled in. If the metadata on that picture is similar to what you want your template to look like, that’s great. You’ll save some work.
One way or another, edit the template to be what you need.
You will notice that each field has a tickbox next to it. If the box is ticked, your template will
overwrite whatever might already exist in that field on a photo with whatever is in that field on the template. If the box is unticked, that field is inactive in the template and nothing will be done to any data that might be there in the photo. If a field is blank and its box is ticked, whatever data might exist in the field on the photo will be cleared.
When importing photos into Lightroom, I can’t imagine wanting to lose any information, so you don’t want to tick boxes for empty fields. There are buttons at the bottom of the dialog that allows you to tick all the boxes, none of them, or just the ones where you have added data.
Once you have your template looking right, go to the ‘Preset’ flyout at the top of the dialog and choose ‘Save Current Settings as New Preset…’ from the bottom of the flyout. Name your preset and save it and you’re ready to go.
Now, when you import a batch of pictures into Lightroom, if you look at the right rail of the import dialog, you’ll see a panel called ‘Apply During Import’. In it, you’ll see a flyout for metadata. From that flyout, you simply
choose a preset. Click ‘Import’, and shazam! Your photos will be imported, and your template metadata will be applied in Lightroom’s database to your photos, with basically no work expended on your part.
Two important points to remember here:
1. Lightroom, at this point, has applied metadata to your pictures in its database. It hasn’t done anything to your files yet. We’ll circle back to this later.
2. The ‘Apply During Import’ setting is sticky. Next time you import photos, it will still be set to apply your template. You may NOT want to apply a template for some reason, perhaps on photos that already have metadata. So LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP. Double check! You have been warned.
Caption your photos
Now we want to apply metadata that applies specifically to the photos in the batch we’re working on. In Lightrooms right rail, look at the Metadata panel. At the top, there is a flyout for views. (There isn’t enough room in the panel to show all the fields, so this is necessary.) ‘IPTC’ gives a good overview of metadata on the photo.
In Lightrooms right rail, look at the Metadata panel. At the top, there is a flyout for views. (There isn’t enough room in the panel to show all the fields, so this is necessary.) ‘IPTC’ gives a good overview of metadata on the photo and is my personal default.
Change the view to ‘Large Caption’. That will give us a form field big enough to see what we’re doing in the caption. Simply select a picture and type in your caption information. There is no ‘Save’ or ‘Apply’ function. You’re typing straight into the database.
To copy the information you just entered to all the photos in your batch, you can do one of several things:
Option 1
Select the photo that has the new caption information. Go to the ‘Metadata’ pulldown in Lightroom’s main menu and choose ‘Copy Metadata’. This will bring up a dialog similar to the one we used when we made our template. Make sure that the Caption field is the only one ticked. Bear in mind here that we can’t append or prepend information to fields in Adobe Lightroom. Whatever is in the caption field in the dialog will overwrite whatever is in the field on the target photos. Make sure that the whole caption and your byline is still there. When everything looks right, click ‘Copy’.
Now select all the photos to which you want to add the new information. Go back to the ‘Metadata’ pulldown on the main menu and choose ‘Paste Metadata’. You’ll see a progress bar and your new caption will be applied.
Option 2
Select the photo that has the information you want to copy. Now, using Command/Control-Click, or Shift-Click, add the photos to which you want to add the information to the selection. You’ll notice that the source (Or ‘Active’ in Lightroom-speak) photo will be highlighted a bit more brightly than the target photos.
Click the ‘Sync’ button at the bottom of the right rail.
The same dialog from above will appear. Make sure that only the Caption tickbox is ticked and that the information looks right. Click ‘Synchronize’. You’ll see a progress bar and your new information will be applied to your pictures.
Option 3.
You can use the Paint Tool (spray can) to spray metadata. The Paint Tool can only spray templates, so you’ll have to make a new preset (template) to squirt onto pictures.
With the Paint Tool selected, choose ‘Metadata’ from the flyout that appears to the tool’s right, and to the right of that, choose the template you want to spray. This technique is good if you have different sets of data you want to apply to arbitrary pictures in your batch.
Now go back through your photos and edit the captions to add information specific to individual photos.
You can use the Copy-Paste or Sync functions to copy captions between photos that can use the same caption information.
Embed the new metadata in your photos
At this point, we have added IPTC metadata to our photos in the Lightroom database. We haven’t written any new data to the files on disk. Should a photo be copied or moved to another folder, or if anything happens to the Lightroom database, we’ll lose our metadata. not just our metadata that we just entered, but any information that Lightroom has stored about color changes or other edits you have made. That would be bad.
There are three ways to handle this new challenge:
Set a global preference, per catalog
One way is to set a global preference in Lightroom’s Catalog Settings that tells Lightroom to automatically write any metadata changes to the files, as you go along. This is great if you have a fast computer. (I don’t.) Every time you do anything to a picture, Lightroom will write new metadata to its file in the background. (We’re talking about both so-called ‘develop’ data and metadata we add to pictures here.) There’s a performance penalty to be paid if we do that.
If you want to go this way, go to Lightroom’s Catalog Settings dialog (In the same pulldown with Preferences), choose the Metadata tab and tick the tickbox at ‘Automatically Write Changes to XMP’.
One further note about this method: The Catalog Settings preference is global for that oneparticular catalog. If you go this way, you’ll need to check the settings for each catalog you use.
Update files manually
Another way to deal with writing our metadata to the files is to wait and update manually. To do this, all we have to do is select the files we want to write to, go to the ‘Metadata’ pulldown in the main menu, and choose ‘Save Metadata to File’.
This way is great in that we control when we have our machine at full speed and when we bog it down with metadata writing. But the drawback is that we can lose track of which files need to be written. Then, in an abundance of caution, we simply select all the files in our batch and update. That’s totally fine, except that of we have hundreds of files, it’s going to take a while.
Make updating easier with a Smart Collection
There’s a third path. We can use Lightroom’s Smart Collections feature to show us exactly which files need to be updated and just update those.
Smart Collections are found in Lightroom’s left rail (by default; you can move this stuff around).
Click on the ‘+’ at the top of the Collections panel and choose ‘Create Smart Collection…’. Lightroom opens a dialog to edit the Smart Collection.
Leave ‘Match’ at ‘All’.
From the leftmost flyout (by default, it will show ‘Rating’) choose ‘Other Metadata> Metadata Status’.
The middle flyout will automatically change to ‘is’.
From the rightmost flyout, choose ‘Has been changed’.
That’s it. Name your new Smart Collection and save it.
Now, whenever you have images that need to have their metadata updated on disk, those images (virtual links to them, actually) will appear as if by magic in your Smart Collection. Select them all, choose ‘Save Metadata to File’ from the Metadata pulldown in the main menu, and watch pictures disappear from the Smart Collection as they are updated and no longer fit the criteria for inclusion in the Smart Collection. I’ve got to say, this is pretty slick!
Export photos from Lightroom
In order to actually use a photo from Adobe Lightroom, we have to export it. Remember that Lightroom doesn’t make any changes as we go along; it just makes a list of things we want to do with the image. When we export, it actually does all those things.
To export photos, select them and click the ‘Export’ button at the bottom of Lightroom’s left rail.
Now you will see the export dialog. In this dialog, we choose parameters for Lightroom to use when it writes our exported files to disk. Here, we can choose things like the pixel dimensions of our new files, their compression, file names and formats and more, including how we want Lightroom to handle metadata.
There’s a section in the Export dialog for metadata.
In it, you’ll find a flyout that allows you to choose what metadata will be included on export. You can choose ‘All Metadata’ or various subsets, down to only copyright data. (Why on earth anybody would want to blank out copyright data is beyond me. If you really need to, that can be done in Lightroom, but not here.)
Choose an option from the flyout.
Below the flyout, you’ll see tick boxes for ‘Remove Person Info’ and ‘Remove Location Info’.
‘Person Info’ refers to specialized keywords that Lightroom will put into the Keywords field if you use Lightroom’s facial recognition feature. If you don’t use facial recognition, this is meaningless. If you do, you get to choose whether or not those keywords are left on your pictures.
‘Location Info’ is all information in any location field in your metadata and GPS coordinates. That includes any information you entered in fields like City and State, and any information that Lightroom automatically entered in those fields. (If you turn on the feature, Lightroom can resolve GPS coordinates to physical addresses, right down to the house number.) If you want to zap that info from your exported photos, this is where you do it.
When you are satisfied with your export settings, click ‘Export’ and sit back while your output files are made for you.
What if you want to export a version of a photo with different metadata?
Here’s a pro tip: Lightroom has the ability to make ‘virtual copies’ of photos. (Right-click on a photo and choose ‘Create Virtual Copy’.) There’s no physical copy of the photo made on disk; Lightroom just makes another set of metadata in the database to describe an alternate edit of the picture.
This function is normally used for black and white versions of a photo, or versions targeted for a specific printer, or the like. Virtual copies inherit the IPTC metadata of their parents, but you can then edit it so that the virtual copy has its own IPTC info. This is tremendously useful in cases where you want to export a version of a picture with custom metadata. Let’s say you want to send a version to a client with custom Rights/Usage information for just that client. This is where you do that. If you do, for some reason, need to output a picture with no copyright information, this is the place where you would do that, too.
Which IPTC fields are we really concerned about? And what do the fields mean? If you peruse the photo at the top of this page, you’ll see that some of the field labels are pretty opaque. We’ll see which ones we will need to fuss with picture-by-picture, which ones we fill in our template just once, and which we can safely ignore.
We should be able to look at a photo, or another digital asset, and see for sure who owns the copyright, how to credit the photographer, and what the heck is going on in the picture. It’s one thing that the client signed a contract that promises they’ll give you only material that’s properly licensed. Knowing for sure would be another, better, thing.
If you buy a jar of queso dip, it’s got labels, right? You can see what you can use it for, how to contact the manufacturer, and that “best by date”. It seems reasonable that in this day and age digital assets should have labels, too, right?
Turns out they do have. Make that “can have”, If the creator of the asset chooses to write the information in his or her his file’s metadata. And if we look. Sadly, few people even know that we can look at that information. That makes creators less likely to put it there. Which makes it less likely that anybody looks, which……….. It’s one of those vicious circle thingies.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate” – (The Captain, From Cool Hand Luke)
Good news: it’s not hard to see metadata. Your operating system (Windows, Mac, and Linux) displays captions in its file manager. Image editing software, from fancy and expensive to simple and free, can edit IPTC metadata. Command line utilities can manipulate it on the server.
But there’s bad news. Let’s say if a conscientious photographer does write his or her copyright and contact information and a good caption on a photo, will everything be OK? Ah, maybe. The chances are good that the first website that gets its hands on the poor photo will strip all that information off.
Back in the day, stripping off an image’s metadata actually made sense. That was when the rule of thumb was that landing pages had to be less than 40 kilobytes, back before they were even called landing pages.
That was then. Now it’s different. The internet is flooded with works that have come asunder from their copyright notices and captions. They would be useful if we knew what they are, but we don’t, so they aren’t. There’s a feeding frenzy of copyright infringement and plagiarism and ethical people are concerned, very concerned.
It would be great if critical information was embedded in every photo that was sent out into the internet world; if that information stayed with that asset forever, and we knew just what we were dealing with every time we picked up a photo. Let’s make that (start to) happen.
Ensure that documentation is not destroyed, so it can travel with the work wherever it goes.
As soon as we publish them, digital photos begin traveling the web at the speed of a right mouse button.
As web developers, designers, and site owners our part is to make sure that neither we, nor our CMSes, ever unnecessarily strip metadata off works.
But wait! “Unnecessarily” suggests that there’s nuance, and nuance suggests that there is annoying underlying technical complication (and acronyms). Of course, there is! This being a full-disclosure kind of blog, we’ll unravel that. Well, some of it. I’ll spare you the low-level stuff. We’ll discuss that in depth later.
Back in the day, there were two reasons for stripping metadata: load time and privacy concerns.
Back then, 8KB one way or the other materially affected load time. Today, that’s like five one-thousands of a second for a user with seriously mediocre internet service. Not a big worry.
I said eight kilobytes because That’s about how much metadata we really need on a photo. That’s the stuff that could be useful for saving the world. There is, however, more.
Really important metadata and less important metadata
Basically, there are a couple of flavors of metadata written into photos.
There’s IPTC metadata. That’s the world saving stuff – caption, creator, and copyright information. IPTC metadata appears in a file twice (usually), once in its old-timey
…the takeaway here is that we should avoid tampering with IPTC data, but we may want to delete Exif data…
proprietary format and once in the new-fangled XML-based XMP format. But it’s tiny.
(There’s also the possibility of other, non-IPTC, data written in XMP format. It’s not very big, either. We’ll just skip that, since in the context of publishing a picture on the web I can’t think of a reason why we would care one way or the other.)
Then there’s Exif metadata. Exif data is written by the camera when a digital picture is made. It’s mostly boring logging data. It records the camera model, serial number and the settings used to make the photo. EXIF also can include GPS data showing where the photo was made. That could identify the user. We’ll come back to that in a bit.
JPEG files can also have an embedded JPEG thumbnail. We’ll leave musing about what the heck for to another day. Said thumbnail, if present, can take up twenty or thirty-ish kilobytes.
The good news here is that the useless and potentially enormous thumbnail resides in
…it appears to be pretty seriously illegal to remove or alter “copyright management information”.
the EXIF metadata. The rest of the Exif metadata is of little interest to the greater good. There may be an argument for keeping it – travel pictures might be better off if not sundered from their GPS data, photography or sports sites might need the logging information – but on the whole, EXIF data is pretty expendable. We can decide to zap all or part of it without much remorse.
In a future post, I’ll talk about exactly how, and software we can use.
Consider before you strip
Exif or otherwise, in our strip-or-don’t-strip deliberations we should pause to consider some more stuff: legality and privacy.
Here’s where I say that I’m not a lawyer. I don’t play a lawyer on TV, not even YouTube. When in doubt, talk to your own lawyer! You know the drill.
Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it appears to be pretty seriously illegal to remove or alter “copyright management information”. Statutory damages are set at between $2,500 and $25,000 per occurrence.
No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law—
(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information,
(2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, or
(3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.
(c) Definition.—As used in this section, the term “copyright management information” means any of the following information conveyed in connection with copies or phonorecords of a work or performances or displays of a work, including in digital form, except that such term does not include any personally identifying information about a user of a work or of a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a work:
(1) The title and other information identifying the work, including the information set forth on a notice of copyright.
(2) The name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work.
(3) The name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright.
…[skipping a couple items that don’t apply to pictures]…
(6) Terms and conditions for use of the work.
(7) Identifying numbers or symbols referring to such information or links to such information.
That’s pretty blunt stuff for something that politicians wrote.
The stuff they define as being “copyright management information” would be found in the IPTC fields for Caption, Title, Author, Copyright, Rights Usage Information, and various contact information and PLUS licensing fields. Possibly in Special Instructions, as well. That’s enough of the IPTC fields that we can pretty safely assume that the path of least regret here is to be very cautious about messing with any IPTC data.
You can do whatever you want with the copyright management information on works to which you own the copyright, of course. Or, if the copyright owner gives you permission, you may strip away. Some sites, like Facebook, include language in their Terms of Service that grants them permission to alter CMI on photos. But it’s worth noting that Facebook does leave the copyright notice and the creator’s byline on pictures. They strip out everything else but leave those two fields alone. That says something.
Privacy can be a consideration
Then we have privacy. Everybody nowadays has their undies in a bunch about privacy. Some concerns are legit. Some are silly. But still, we need to think about this.
In the EXIF, there’s that potentially identifying GPS information. Geotagging information can be useful. You could, say, automatically display a map with travel photos. (Or leave the possibility open for the next person who uses that picture.) On the other hand, if you’re not going to mention where a picture was made in a caption that’s visible to visitors, it might be nice to delete the GPS info. I can imagine cases where that would be justified, like maybe a picture of a fisherman at his favorite top secret fishing spot, for example. How convenient it is that GPS info lives in the rather expendable EXIF and not near the DMCA-protected copyright data in the IPTC!
And what about identifying information in the IPTC metadata?
When we consider information in the IPTC data, the first point to consider is that the photographer deliberately put it there. Do you trust that he or she did their job properly? The very fact that the information is there says something positive about the photographer’s professionalism.
Identifying is exactly what the caption is there to do. Specificity builds your authority. Barring pretty unusual circumstances, you want to tell your visitors exactly who is shown in a photo, what they’re doing, and in what context.
Now, you may decide for some privacy-based reason or another not to publish
information that is in the metadata with a photo. Then you might want to edit that same information out of the metadata, too. You might be concerned about doxing, for instance.
It’s a case-by-case thing. But honestly, it’s not something that comes up often. In my career as a newspaper photo editor, I published dozens of photos a day. I’d kill a photo or write around somebody’s identity a handful of times a year.
What I’m saying here is always look before you leap and use good judgment for each image you publish. There’s software that makes it easy. I’ll post more on what’s out there and how to use it later.
(General purpose ethical note: If serious privacy concerns are making you even think about whether to withhold all or part of someone’s identity, the ethical path of least regret is usually not to run that picture at all. It’s serious business. One day, I’ll devote a post to this, too.)
So, the big takeaway here is that we should avoid tampering with IPTC data, but we may want to delete EXIF data (and its potentially huge thumbnail).
Systems issues. Or automation might not be your friend.
Content management systems tend to strip off metadata by default. It’s an extremely rare case when that’s a good thing. We really need to make them stop.
Sadly, many websites, including all the big news sites and social media sites, delete metadata. I know why this is. I was there when it happened. All the photos used on professional grade news sites have metadata embedded. Many of those sites create their own images. In the metadata of those images, there may be proprietary or identifying information that might not be at all suitable for publication. (And, yes, of course, there was once a grand mistake, followed by a grand legal mess of the sort that gets publishers’ attention.) That’s when everybody in that business decided to strip out metadata programmatically, rather than simply being careful with each image. The assumption then was that those sites were altering works to which they owned the copyright, so no blood no foul. But who employs full-time staff photographers anymore?
If your content management system is automatically stripping metadata, you should consider making it stop. Compare the cost of paying a developer to fix your server to the cost of paying a lawyer to make a copyright suit go away.
Then there are the CMSes that the rest of us use. WordPress, for example, is the world’s most popular CMS. Over a quarter of all the world’s websites run on WordPress. WordPress only partially honors photo metadata.
When a photo that has a caption is placed on a page or post in WordPress, the caption is automatically formatted and placed on the page with the picture. So, good on the making-it-easy-see-metadata front. (And the making life easier for people who build pages front, too!)
But when a photo is uploaded to WordPress, by default, four versions of the file are put on the server. The files are made at various sizes, to accommodate devices with screens of varying resolution. Only one of the five files has metadata on it! Ouch. Granted, the file with metadata is the biggest one, which is generally served when a user clicks on a picture for a larger view. That is the version most likely to be grabbed by someone who wants to – legitimately or otherwise – reuse the picture. But still, ouch. We have work to do.
Note: WordPress, by default, actually prefers to use the ImageMagick image processing library, which does honor metadata for all of the sizes of images. But ImageMagick is not necessarily installed on your host’s server, and if it is, you have to enable it. Like I said, work to do…
There is a workaround. But workarounds require extra work and can only be performed by people who are well informed and technically savvy. (The readers of this blog, let’s say.) That’s good news for “us”, and a tiny first baby step toward saving the world. I’ll post a how-to shortly.
Insist that your server not do anything you might regret later.
Look carefully at every picture before you publish it. Distrust the ones that don’t have good metadata. Heed what the metadata says in those that do.
Yes, we can do our bit to turn the tide to protect content creators’ rights, keep ourselves out of copyright trouble, preserve history, and save ourselves some time and legal exposure. But there’s work ahead of us. Let’s do it!
I’ll pass on how-to information in future posts. We’ll look at software, legal issues, and best practices. If you make pictures, you can take a look at my companion rant exhorting photographers to put proper metadata on their pictures. It’s already accompanied by some how-to information and a video showing just how quick and easy it is to do the (copy)right thing.
I’d love to hear from you. Please post in the comments, or click the “contact” button!