My Workflow | Part 5: Extra-Metadata on Phill Price | Photography

My Workflow | Part 5: Extra-Metadata

Another quick one today, but a very important one. Many people leave their photos with the name form the camera – or none at all, and there are a lot of photos out there who go un-noticed as they are lost in the hundreds of others. Titles, tags and captions will help.

title, description and tags

I title my shots with short snappy words, for instance “Look Up”, “Cruciple” and “1″ (seen below) rather than “Statue in France”, “Top of a building” or “Racing Car” it’s more evocative and plays on words rather than a description of the photo.

I use the caption (where there is one) to describe the photo – it normally *cough SmugMug* (it doesn’t there) go into the description under the photo. sometimes it contains stuff it really shouldn’t – there’s no real point putting details about how it was shot as that is contained within the EXIF data embedded in the file. Occasionally I use it for messages as well - and I shouldn’t!

Finally tags, these work as a way of finding your images, both for yourself in your library but also in searches withing Flick, Zooomr, Ipernity, and even Google and Yahoo.

All Referere's to my flickr stream, the majority through searches

All Referrers to my flickr stream, the majority through searches

Don’t over do it but do include synonyms. I tend to also expand them out (probably wrongly) so Goodwood Festival of Speed was expanded to:

goodwood
festival
speed
good festival
festival of speed
goodwood festival of speed

Which it shouldn’t do. If the location wasn’t added in the import I also add it here. Ideally I should use the hierarchy feature of Lightroom, so instead of adding

uk
england
london
canary wharf
e14
docklands

I should use the hierarchy and synonyms, where I can then add “canary wharf” and it’ll add synonyms and the above automatically. I’d probably pay for someone set that hierarchy up!

Am I not making sense? John Arnold at PhotoWalkthrough probably explains it all better…

So that sums up the extra metadata embedded into each photo. Thankfully doing it here means it will stay with the photo wherever it goes (unless it is stripped) meaning you’ll never have to add it again, and its searchable.

4 Comments

Breandan
12pm, 31/12/08

You may also want to consider http://www.getdropbox.com - 2 GB free/50 GB paid (for $10/month). Does file checksums to avoid the "moved file is backed up again" problem, among other really cool things. And it's seamlessly cross platform, which can be handy.

Brian Auer
5pm, 31/12/08

Hey Phill, I don't have an index on the series yet... I just have one or two more articles to write, then I'll post a roundup along with a big PDF of everything. And Happy New Year!

Brett Veenstra
11am, 01/01/09

Hey Phill! Thanks for a Great series - it was nice to see another Lightroom users perspective and actual use on the application. I currently use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 for my offline backup. Very happy with it so far! Happy New Year!

Edit My Photo Project: Results! on Phill Price | Photography – A daily photograph from London, England
5pm, 06/07/09

[...] Would you like to see how I edit my photos? I put up a series of 7 articles over Christmas:Geotagging, Import, Smart Collections, Processing, Metadata, Export and Backup [...]

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