One of the confusing topics I get a lot of questions about is metadata - what is really needed and where do I put what? The answer to that question is it depends. It depends on if you are a pro who licenses their images. It depends on how you search for your images. It depends on how much time you have to deal with it. And also it depends on if those images will be submitted to a stock agency.

Because a fair number of my images wind up at my various stock agencies I input metadata according to my stock agencies requirements and add extra metadata where it makes sense. In Lightroom, where I enter pretty much all of my metadata (and keywords) I set it up so that I can see all of the Metadata fields - I want to know what the possibilities are.

First off in my metadata is the caption - all images (that are not deleted) have a full caption. A good caption has who, what, where and when included in it. Since I have the exact date and time the image was shot elsewhere in the metadata I don't really worry about the when aspect of the caption but everything else should be included. I still have to deal with many clients who can't seem to find the metadata and hence, can't find a caption for the image but the caption is searchable and hence, is very important to keeping and building a good Digital Asset Management (DAM) system.

Below the caption, as you can see in the top image at right, is all of the EXIF information from the camera. Next up is the contact info (2nd image at right). In this dialog I enter a copyright symbol (Option + G on Mac) and my name in the Creator field. I don't enter my address and phone number as those are prone to change and I for one don't want to go back in and have to deal with that in all of my images some day. I do enter my email address which will probably not change anytime soon and my website. All of my contact information is kept up to date on my website so this takes care of clients who need to find my address.

In the IPTC fields, see the 3rd image at right, I enter a fair bit of data much of which is embedded when I import my images. The first field I enter data into is the Date Created, and then I move down to the Location, City, State/Province and Country. In the workflow category I indicate in the Job Identifier section if the image is model released or not - all of my images are model released unless they are landscapes - otherwise they aren't worth much. I also put a copyright symbol and my name again in the Provider field because my stock agency requires it. And in the source field I input whether the images was captured digitally or on film and what format was used - either 35mm or medium format.

And finally in the Copyright fields I toggle the status to copyrighted and include a few sentences in the copyright field, which states:

Copyright (c) 2008 Michael Clark Photography. Any use of this image without the permission of the photographer is in violation of the copyright.

I also enter "All Rights reserved" in the Rights Usage Terms field and enter my website address again in the Copyright Info URL field.

This metadata setup takes care of all my needs and satisfies my stock agencies requirements as well. Take from this what you will. There is no right or wrong here - this is just an example.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael