Metadata in photographs

I manage the image library and image approval site for a client based here in Melbourne. Sitting and discussing how other photographers work and the need for each image to have some specific data describing it led to some interesting thoughts.

I can remember when this was hard work, like really hard and I avoided doing it myself. Earlier in my career, late '80s, I was out doing surveys of locations, photographing every aspect of an area and recording the details of where each image was taken. The idea was that I came back to the studio, printed out every image and wrote the details for each image across the bottom, now with 10 or 20 rolls of film this meant a lot of work. This process was labour intensive that many of the images just never had this information written on them, thinking that it was easy enough to cross reference the prints with my original written notes.

Even then I was able to see the potential for databases and being able to search for a specific location and recognising that this information would still have to be entered.

Well in that time many products have come and gone, each building on the other. Today the landscape for photographers is quite different and it is very easy to add metadata to photographs. Using a product such as Apples Aperture or Adobes Lightroom the process has become extremely streamlined. All photographers need to get their images from camera to end use and these two products fit very neatly in to that gap.

As the photographer we are quite often best positioned to add information to the images we shoot describing what we have captured. Why do we want to do this for our clients? Whilst a photograph may tell 1000 words, where is that river, where is that person standing, who is that person, you and the person commissioning the job may know, everyone else in the company who finds out about the shoot and visits your online gallery is desperate to know if they can use the image as well. If the answer is "Yes", you get a request for a hires version of the image and another sale, "No" and people will not bother coming back to your site.

My client was amazed at how little data most photographers were adding to the images uploaded to phototshelter.com for them to review. In one instance three days worth of shooting at a variety of locations and all of the images were lumped together with the one generic description and in the one gallery. No one had any idea where the images were actually shot, my client was very frustrated, these images were stunning but how could she use them for anything other than a generic landscape shot without caption.

Using one of the current crop of tools available to process our raw files is logical, they make it easy to batch process, well the same is true of adding descriptions and keywords, it is easy and adds value to your work.