Examining it – for photos taken by you or photographers you admire – offers clues about photography techniques, what separates good shots from mediocre. Can’t remember your daughter’s graduation date? Find the photo and look up its metadata.ĮXIF metadata is a great way to learn about photography. Can’t recall the location of that fabulous seafood restaurant in Maine, but have a photo of the lobster bisque you ate? Search for ‘Maine’, and once the photo pops up, check its metadata. Once you’ve got metadata in your photos, you’ll find many uses for it. Metadata enriched photos are easy to find even in very large libraries. Renaming photos from the camera-generated ‘IMGXXX’ to, e.g., ‘Spain vacation’ can make your photo library ‘human friendly’. With photo metadata-enriched images, tasks such as finding all your 2015 photos or your best 1990s photos can be completed in seconds instead of hours. Google Image Search, Bing Image Feed and other search engines also identify and display relevant search results based on photo metadata.Īdding locations, descriptions and keywords greatly simplifies searching for photos. Photo programs such as Photos for Mac, Picasa and Flickr use metadata to organize, sort and provide search results. personal profile, licensing and copyright information.
Mac edit image metadata professional#
In addition to these, professional photographers should also fill administrative tags, e.g. Hundreds of IPTC metadata tags are available, but most of us will only need Date and Time Created, Location, Description and Keywords. IPTC data is supplied by the photographer, and added manually.Īn expanded version of IPTC metadata standards is XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), created by Adobe.
If you’re looking at 25 year old photos, chances are you won’t remember all the names, dates, places and other important details. Looking for your 2015 fall vacation photos? Good luck!īut then, the bigger question: Do You Know What’s in Them? Your first hurdle would be to gather and scan them. It gets harder if you want to make an album of your best 1990s pictures. Even if everyone in the family had saved photos to the same computer, it’d be a chore to locate and sort them.
Let’s say you’re making a slideshow of your 2015 fall vacation photos.
It’s a flood of our own making, and we are drowning. Gigabytes worth of digital images in our computers, smartphones, cloud accounts and external drives.
Why bother to edit image metadata? Short answer: To make your photos easy findable, and, if you are a professional photographer, to assert your ownership rights over your work.