A recent podcast by Derrick Story podcast, titled “Mark Your Photos“, talks about adding metadata to your photos to ensure you’ve got your copyright info and other data (exif, etc) embedded in them.

This is a great tip that a lot of beginning photographers don’t think about. While you may only be taking photographs of your family and posting them to facebook, flickr or another location, it still makes sense to add basic copyright info and your contact information.

In addition to adding your copyright information, metadata will help you later when you are looking for those photos from Seattle…if you add metadata to them (e.g., tag it as  “Seattle”) you’ll be able to find those photos much quicker in the future.

Metadata includes information about your photographs that can be used to sort, manage and retrieve these photographs at a later date.

Adding metadata to a photo should be fairly simple and straightforward. Most digital cameras these days come with software to allow you to edit and/manage your photos and most of these products provide some form of metadata entry mechanism.  If you use a photo editing and/or management tool like Apple‘s Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop CS4, Bridge CS4 Apple iPhoto or other similar tools, you will have an easy time of adding meta-data.

While you may not take 1000′s of photographs, you still could use some type of workflow when moving your images to your computer for storage.  This workflow will be different for each person but its nice to know you have one that work s for you.  A few good books on the subject are listed below…jump over to Amazon and read more about the topic.

• Lightroom 2: Streamlining your Digital Photography Process
• David Pogue’s Digital Photography: The Missing Manual
• Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook: A Guide to Staying Ahead of the Workflow Curve
• The Complete Raw Workflow Guide: How to get the most from your raw images in Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, Photoshop, and Elements
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Workflow Bible

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• Copy GPS Metadata Back into Photoshop TIFFs with Bridge Scripting (blogs.adobe.com)
• Import and Export options for Metadata (blogs.adobe.com)

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4. From a Snapshot to a Photograph
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