Lessons

Lesson Info

Metadata

the metadata is another one of those elements. I want to talk a little bit more in depth about this here in a second, the most important thing you can get, a fishing that probably in terms of getting a handle on your workflow, is to get a handle on your metadata. So metadata is the information about the photograph, and it comes in a variety of different ways. We can get information about the actual image itself. So the dimensions of the photograph the camera was shot with a serial number, the lens the focal length, the aperture they have stopped. That's all metadata. But then we can also add additional metadata. On top of that, there's two big buckets. The camera data is called X F data, the other data as I PTC. And there's some standards around those so storm software to software. For the most part, we get a really consistent look at the data. So one of the things I do on my import preset by coming in it that preset with that preset is doing is it's gonna add in some information autom...

atically to every single image it's imported. So one of the things I want to do is I want to make sure I've got copyright information on every one of my photographs when it imports so I can put in a copyright and then into right to you See Joe, all rights reserved. We usually up here. I also have all rights reserved if they're in the copyright as well. There's some legal reasons if you're dealing with overseas things where you need a all rights reserved there. But I can put this in here. This copyright status copyrighted public domain unknown. This is an interesting field because it's actually specific to the Photoshopped version of the I. P. T. C. Protocol. It's not actually in the governing body. So one of the things I do with this is I used to come in early on and I was copyrighted. Well, I'm an incorporated from time you created, but I was like, Oh, cool, that's cooperate. And then I realized, if I leave, that is unknown from a workflow standpoint. So my problem was one of my problems I was trying to solve was our mind. Is myself registered with copyright office and when do I do that? Because you get that 90 day graze for on public first published. We go through all that I realized if I leave the copy status is unknown. I could then search on the unknown field and would tell me which one of my images have been applied to the copyright office and accepted in which ones hadn't. So because whether or not it's copyrighted was in material because it already was copywriter, for the moment I created it. But this field I got to use in a way I hadn't considered before. So I'm gonna show you a smart collection where I use this That allows me to figure out which of my photographs have been hit at a certain level with the copyright office. Is it exactly probably how the field was intended to be used? No. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about some other ways to apply some of these tools. But if I go in here and save this preset, then creating a preset create when I apply that now that copyright information was gonna medically written and every photograph, so I have a metadata preset. That's copyright on. All it's basically doing is dropping in some copyright information under the key words here, I could apply the keywords. If you're a photographer who shoots kind of in a seeing their bucket, you're gonna commercial Shoot. You could easily come in here and shoot the information about the client, the job, the models name, the location, a bunch of information there. If you're like me, where you're like wandering around in your photograph in anything of the Sun ki warning, it's a little harder. It's like there some blue stuff in a couple, so I keyword a little later, but on my editorial work, I just finished the work for a gallery where I shot the interior architecture that all got keyboard right away because every image got that applied. So again, I'm thinking about what problems trying to solve for down the road destination again, this is what you're gonna have to decide. Do you want to organize things by date to go on organized by sub folder. Do you want to return to buy location, name by client name? That all is fine, however you decide to do there. But the key again is that consistency you don't want to do. Date on 1/3 of um, client name on two of them. Your dog's name on three of them, Some random thing. You just type because you were in a hurry. You want to be consistent every single time. The other piece that a lot of people don't play with is down here at the very bottom of the screen. What does a man Sweet. There's this import preset down here with that import. Preset does is it remembers all the settings from above, and I can come in and create a preset for imports. So if I have chosen my file name preset my metadata preset. I've selected the destination options I want. I have selected the don't import selected duplicates. I wanted to go in a certain collection. It will save all of that automatically. And then in the minimal window, all I have to do is come in and select that preset. And it would remember those settings. So again, from ah, I'm gonna import fine artwork, commercial work, editorial work. I can come in and quickly come in and make sure all my settings are exactly the same the next time. So these were some of my favorite actual presets in light room. Are these really quick get in? Because the work I do here saves things down the road. Okay, Once I've got stuff in the light room. Now we got to go through the next step of trying to figure things out. So Adobe did a great job of giving me a lot of options, but I couldn't figure out how to use a lot of the options. I was like, Oh, they're star rankings. So what Most people use the starlings for. How cool your photographs. Right. Five stars, Amazing four stars. Mostly amazing three stars. Like maybe something cool happens. And then you get these two stars than one stars, photographs Mom likes. Mom likes everything. So it occurred to me like, well, five star photographs. Great. Four stars. Great. Why would I ever go look? A two were one star photograph. So why would I do that? I wouldn't. So I was like, Well, why would I spend the time to come in and be like for three five to? So I go through this series of images ranking those elements. But then I realized what if I rethought about how to use five stars? What if that actually meant something different. What if the star rankings were an indication of potentially my workflow? One photograph is to be a are to be selected to is to be edited. Three. Is it going to be printed or is It's in the portfolio. Five. It's been delivered to client as long as I'm consistent with that and I make that the same every single time. And I believe in notes that when I die, somebody comes into my life from catalogs, like got a lot of one star photographs that are gonna sketchy but you want to have that documented. But in that shape of what do I think about those those stars for? Because the other thing that does is really at the end of the day, when you're editing photographs, what do you want to know? You want to know what I want, edit it or not a my keeping it or not? What's your pick flag? So the pick flag tells me I'm gonna pick it or not Pick it P for pick. You front pick extra reject. Once I reject it, I get rid of it. But now, if I'm gonna pick it then I was like, Well, now I really don't need the stars. So how else could I use those color rankings Or the same way I can come in and apply a yellow? I'll go to agree, view? I can apply a yellow label. I can apply a green label. I can apply a blue label. I comply a purple label. So one of the ways we could think about using that Well, it occurred to me if I look at my HDR photographs. So if I come to a collection that is all my HDR images, you'll see they all have a blue label on him because this is way over exposed. I would normally get rid of that photograph, but with the blue label, it tells me, Oh, that's part of a sequence I'm gonna build on hdr out of Don't delete that or I'm gonna miss a chunk of my HDR. After that point blue is in material to me. So again I'm trying to solve a problem. I accidentally deleted some of my HDR source files and then I was like can't build the right steps in the HDR. A panel is the same way I'm notoriously bad about getting rid of panel pieces. I'm, like, shoot the Seattle skyline. I'm like, what do I have half of the naming to that hill. And I'm like, Oh, that was the hill in the middle between this base new in the stadium. So in that world of making those green So I make those green my panel sit with a green coat. So again, I'm trying to solve a problem. The problem is, I have a set of images that need to be sequenced together. So I'm gonna play, though, so of that color and stars. So I got some options to work with with those. The other thing that's gonna allow me to do is I can start to use some of the additional searching tool. So if I know that three star images are gonna be printed, I can now search for all three store images and I can see everything's potentially were printed. I can search for just the blue images that are done. I can search for just blue images that have the name HDR when they start to pull together so I can start to pull together and find these little threads of put pulling images together. So just in that next step of trying to cool down, I'm trying to think differently about how I would use the photographs if I was working with, you know, the person we both wanted to select photographs. So I have, ah, assistant. They get to pick stars. I get to pick colors reds of the equivalent of a keeper. Five stars equivalent keeper for them because now we can overlay to rankings on top of the same photograph. But I was a wedding photographer. You know, I could send out the photographs and just ask him, You know, anything you like, put a one through five on in your stack ranking order, Then I could overlay my colors on top of that and potentially have then would ended up being the strongest of photographs. So this, um, different ways to start to think about how to use those tools once I've kind of gone through, and I've got some options to figure that out. So I looked through my work flow, and I'm like, I need to figure out the photographs to edit. I could work through that way so I could use just the very basic tools in the library module to do that, so that gives me a way of really structuring a way of deciding which photographs to work on. But that really hasn't helped me from in a long term efficiency standpoint, And it hasn't got me to answer the bigger question of how do I find this stuff? I'm actually isn't working out. Like I said, the finding element it comes down to really understanding what's in that metadata. We've applied a little bit here. Star rankings, colors things like that. But if we come into the metadata panel, we've got some options over here and light room defaults to default. Which gives me a nice look at some of the information about my file. I can see flash information lens camera information, copyright information. What folder doesn't live in. But if I come down here to e x I f data, here's Mawr information about the cameras. In this case it was shot at a focal length of 44 millimeters. There's the actual exposure information, time and dates. Is the photograph been cropped? If we come by PTC now, I've got information about me and my contact information. So I have my contact information there. So my photos get exported and I exported with the copyright or with the metadata. You get my address now? I don't put my actual address in there. People are weird. They show up in my house. They're like, Hey, I thought we'd get some pizza. No, but if somebody is looking for me between my name Langley Washington, that would be close enough for them to figure out this is actually the right photographer. I've got some other options down here. Content image status. And here's that copyright information. So all of this data is available to me to actually put information into if I come to I PTC extended. I now get to some of ones I'm or interested in. I've got stuff down here like property release I D. So I have a property release. I can put the property release I d right in there. So I have a my property I d Air released. This is I can do whatever I need to do with the property from photographs showing standpoint. I can now tag that photograph with that release I d. So now when I look at the photograph and somebody calls up and they say, Hey, is that gotta release on it? The old way I had to do that was I'd go look at the photograph. I go to my releases. I flipped through my releases. I mean, like, I don't think that has a release on it. But this other one, that's kind of like it might have a release on it. But if I put that in here in this exact image, I now have the release directly tied to the image. So all I have to do is look at the metadata and go, Oh, it's release. Not only that, it's released Go to my file by released 988 I know I have exactly weeks. The other one is I can come up here. And there's also models model release informations in here, including the AIDS. So there are certain rights and restrictions you have working with minors than you do working with adults like Come in here and put it was age 15. It's a limited model unlimited limited moderately is put in the release. I d. I can put any additional information there. I can put in the age of the model additional content there. The reason this is great. This is searchable. So once I get the data into the metadata, I can then go look for it later. So any of the fields become at some point searchable the other field that really like is this large caption field because this is an open text field. So one of things that happens if you're working some potentially with commercial work is you may get yourself in a position of I have images that I have a a time period on where the limit has been licensed for or at some point later I could turn it into stock. I can put license until 12 2017 in that large caption field, and in a second, I'm gonna show you I can then go search for that. So if my licence intel X amount X date, I could always come in and search for that. If I can search for it, I can then build something called a smart collection which we're gonna step into, which would allow me to further get down into the low levels, always being able to see that data in real time. It's one of the exciting parts about that. So the key is to come in here and figure out what data do I need to apply? And to do that now. And I'm like repeating myself again. But consistent and reliable and then repeatable was the last one, Remember? So I repeat myself, if you're only doing half your model releases on the metadata and you're relying on that metadata and light room or Enbridge or somewhere else to search for, you only have half the information. So you've got to be really consistence of the decision is I'm gonna apply this piece of metadata and I'm gonna do it. You're going to do it every single time. It feels like you're going to be taking a step back in terms of the amount of work you're doing, what you're really not. It's more work up front. But the payouts in the long run, the most time intensive thing you're going to do from running your business is the management of your image in your image rights. So who has the rights to what? Who gets to see what who gets to do what, how many things of Isil is a fine art photographer. I put a A I don't do it because it drives me crazy. But if I put a limited edition out one of 10 I better know if I've sold 12 or eight of those because I can't tell the collector this is the 3rd 1 again. Okay, I've gotta have that information somewhere. So having it in here allows me to see that information.