Metadata Presets

One of the key factors in organizing and tracking your images is metadata. There are many types of metadata that Lightroom handles well. The two main groups of metadata are EXIF and IPTC.

EXIF stands for EXchangeable Information File and contains the details about the image supplied by the camera. Generally, the EXIF information should not be edited after capture. However, date and time corrections are usually allowed.

IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) is where we enter most of our descriptive information that does not relate to the technical capture aspects of the image. Things like descriptions, keywords, creator, copyright data, etc.

Lightroom brings metadata front and center in the Library module’s Metadata panel over on the right.

While it is recommended that you enter as much metadata as you can as you work with an image, Lightroom provides a key feature that will allow you to get a lot of the most common and general pieces of metadata into each and every file as it is imported into your catalog. That feature is Metadata Presets.

You can access metadata presets from several different locations. Go to the Metadata menu and click on Edit Metadata Presets…

In the Metadata panel click on the Preset drop down and choose Edit Presets…

Or, in the Input dialog go to the Information to Apply section and click the Metadata drop down and choose either New… or Edit Presets…

Once you get there you will be presented with the following dialog

As you can see there are several sections. If we collapse the sections we see there are seven:

• Basic Info
• IPTC Content
• IPTC Copyright
• IPTC Creator
• IPTC Image
• IPTC Status
• Keywords

A basic preset that is always useful and can serve as a starting template for others is a copyright/creator preset. Fill in the appropriate information about you and your copyright information.

Now give the preset a name.

And press the Create button at the bottom of the dialog.

With this basic copyright/creator template you can create other, more specific, presets. For example, if you want to apply additional information for a particular client (and you think you will do more work for in the future) simply bring up the basic copyright/creator preset and add any additional client and job specific information. Once you do you will see (edited) after the name of the preset.

Click the drop down next to the name and choose Save Current Settings as New Preset…

Fill in the client/job info to identify the preset in the next dialog.

That returns you to the Metadata Preset dialog with your new preset name showing.

Press the Done button to close the dialog.

Using Metadata Presets will help you maintain an organized catalog and make it easier to quickly apply key information to all your images.

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