Exporting Images with Metadata

Hi everyone, John Batdorf here and today I want to talk to you about metadata. Now metadata is information that is stored at time of capture. It’s basically your camera information, your focal length, your ISO, whether or not your camera fired its flash, the model of camera, if you have a cell phone or a GPS device it’ll record that as well. Now beyond that when you’re developing an image in Camera RAW it can save all those settings as well so did I increase vibrancy, did I increase the clarity, black, so forth, and it’ll store all that information. And one step further, any key wording that you do, so if you do any sort of key wording for search it can save that information as well.

Now why is this a big deal? Well when we export out images sometimes we don’t want to share all that information. We want to control what we’re putting out there. So I’m going to show you how to do that. You’re going to go underneath file and then export. Here we are, here’s the dialog box and what you’re going to want to do, is drag all the way down to where it says metadata. Now currently it’s set for all. That means it’s going to write everything to the file. What I want to do is I want to control what people are seeing. You click right here and I can do copyright only. So it’s just going to copyright Batdorf Photography or maybe I want to copyright and then contact information so they can reach out to me if they come across an image that they want to buy or use on something. Or you may want to select all the information except for camera and raw edit, so basically that’s going to be anything about your camera or any of the edits that you made at the raw conversion. Or you may just leave it at all. Now if I’m uploading to a service for sale I typically just leave it at all and I’ll upload everything. But when I’m posting online I typically leave it right here at copyright and contact information only.

Now I want to show you two files so you have an idea of what this all means once it’s exported. I’m going to open up two images in bridge and then show you one that has all the information in it and one that I just have the copyright and contact information. Here we are in Bridge and these are two images that we exported out. One, the one with the five stars, has all the metadata and this is a file that I would typically export to a service where I’m selling stock photography. I think it’s important that they have a lot of this information so I’ll send that file. It’s going to have what I used to process the image. It’ll have all my keyword information here, which is really critical. As we go down it’ll have my copyright information, the camera that I used as well as some of the adjustments that I made.

Now some people don’t like to share this information and they’d just rather strip it out. That’s why if you take a look we go to just the copyright and contact export that we did, we have just the basic information, the file size, the date it was created, and then our contact information. There’s no key wording in here. There’s nothing about the edits that you’ve made in Camera RAW and there’s really information about your camera itself. I will use that, this file right here, copyright and contact when I’m exporting the image for my blog or anything with social media for the most part, so Facebook, Google +. I’ll export the file using that preset. So those are really the two big differences you need to kind of think what you want to do. It’s a personal choice really, but those are the two settings I basically will use. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email at john@batdorfphotography.com. Thanks a lot.