- Getting started
- Organizing folders
- Using collections to organize images
- Taking your collections on the road
- Using flags and ratings
- Adding metadata
- Tagging faces in the People view
- Organizing photos by location
- Finding and filtering files
- Reconnecting missing files and folders
- Review questions
- Review answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Adding metadata
You can leverage the metadata information attached to the image files to help you organize and manage your photo library. Much of the metadata, such as capture date, exposure time, focal length and other camera settings, is generated by your camera, but you can also add your own metadata to make it easier to search and sort your catalog. In fact, you did just that when you applied keywords, ratings, and color labels to your images. In addition, Lightroom supports the information standards evolved by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), which includes entries for descriptions, keywords, categories, credits, and origins.
You can use the Metadata panel in the right panel group to inspect or edit the metadata attached to a selected image.
In the Grid view, select another photo from the Vacation folder.
Expand the Metadata panel. If necessary, hide the Filmstrip or collapse the other panels in the right panel group so that you can see as much of the Metadata panel as possible. Choose Default from the Metadata Set menu in the header of the Metadata panel.
Even the default metadata set exposes a great deal of information about the image. Although most of this metadata was generated by the camera, some of it can be very useful in sorting your photos; you could filter images by capture date, search for shots taken with a particular lens, or easily separate photos taken on different cameras. However, the default set displays only a subset of an image’s metadata.
Choose EXIF And IPTC from the Metadata Set menu in header of the Metadata panel. Scroll down in the Metadata panel to get an idea of the kinds of information that can be applied to an image.
For the purposes of this exercise, you can choose Quick Describe from the Metadata Set menu.
In the Quick Describe metadata set, the Metadata panel shows the File-name, Copy Name (for a virtual copy), Folder, Rating, and some EXIF and IPTC metadata. You can use the Metadata panel to add a title and caption to a photo, attach a copyright notice, provide details about the photographer and the location where the photo was shot, and also change the star rating.
Click in the Metadata panel to assign the image a rating of three or more stars; then, type Nyhavn 1 in the Title text box and press Enter / Return.
Control-click / Command-click any of the other seven vacation photos to add it to the selection. In the Metadata panel you can see that the folder name, dimensions and the camera model are shared by both files; items not shared by both images now show the entry <mixed>. Changes made to any of the items in the metadata panel, even those with mixed values, will affect both of the selected images. This is a convenient way to edit items such as copyright details for a whole batch of selected images at the same time.
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