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hello i'm carl seibert thanks for joining me in this video we're going to take a look at adding metadata to some pictures in photo mechanic and we're going to pay particular attention to the fields that drive the new features in google images this isn't by any stretch of the imagination going to be a deep dive into working with photo mechanic and metadata there are actually quite a few photo mechanic videos on this channel and you can refer to those for all of the nitty gritty now adding metadata to your pictures has always been important but some new developments in the last year or so some things that are really good news make it even more important right now first up for a couple of years now google images has actually supported three of the iptc metadata fields about your copyright and your identity but this spring in the spring of 2020 google moved that information from being hidden down below a sort of inconspicuous link to right here right on the front of the preview page for an image it's right up front right where everybody can see it and this i think is a really important thing for photographers anybody looking for pictures in google images cannot help but see and understand who made a picture and to whom that picture belongs and for an honest person that's really great news right there because that person can now go ahead and contact you and ask for permission and if the situation is that way pay a license fee to use your picture that is pretty terrific rate in and of itself and if we look right here we can see they've labeled the fields that they're using we can see what what they're doing here's the creator field that's you the photographer and in this particular picture it says melissa renwick this is a picture of greta thundberg doing something and we can see that the copyright for this picture belongs to the canadian press and i would actually recommend adding some rudimentary contact information right here in your copyright field why make somebody look it up put your phone number right here it's a great opportunity and here we have the credit field the credit field is sort of an interesting field it's pretty seriously misunderstood most photographers probably don't even need to fool around with it what the credit field is is best explained by example rather than anything else the credit field is the organization that is responsible for the distribution of a picture or perhaps responsible for the picture itself it is not necessarily the organization that owns it it's who you're working for if you see a credit that says tyler hicks the new york times the new york times is what goes in the credit field here in this particular case this picture it looks like it came from the nbc news site nbc news i'm sure is a member of the associated press they got the picture from the associated press the picture actually belongs to the canadian press who lent it to ap in a content sharing arrangement the credit field isn't even immutable as we can see here originally for this picture it would have been credited to the canadian press and in this particular case it's credited to somebody else so that's a bit confusing and in your case hey it probably doesn't even matter but now google images has added yet another metadata-driven copyright related feature that's a great benefit to photographers here we are at a google handout picture of their new licensable feature now this feature in google images is still in beta this thing is not live yet and for several months now people in the industry have been looking at this handout picture from google that shows how the thing is supposed to look it won't necessarily look exactly like this by the time it comes out by the time you watch this video it's entirely possible that this thing will be released into the market and we will know if i'm right or wrong about how it's supposed to look anyway the point is that you can have a badge like this appear on your thumbnails in google images if you want it the badge says licensable and people can click through the badge and they can be put directly in touch with you moreover if you configure your metadata correctly you can have a specific click-through for the particular picture an e-commerce page where somebody can buy the picture directly which would be great if you're a photo agency or something like that we're just humble photographers we can use that feature and we can use the link but we won't be quite as specific about it now this feature can be driven by iptc metadata that you can very simply include in your photos in fact this is templated at metadata this is part of the standing metadata that you apply at the beginning of the process of marking up photos you might even do it automatically literally without even lifting a finger this is not heavy lifting folks this metadata can also be driven by specific structured markup on a web page which is not something that photographers probably need worry about very often that's more in heavy duty web developer territory so let's go ahead and mark up some pictures and when we get there we'll talk about making this google thing work okay so we're back looking at photo mechanic i'll click on it make the title bar actually say photo mechanic and you'll notice straight off probably that my copy of photo mechanic doesn't look exactly like your copy photo mechanic is very configurable i use the thing every single day so i've configured my photo mechanic to work the way i want it to work once upon a time before i recorded videos about photo mechanic i went to pretty great effort to try to return my copy to a default condition so that it would look like everybody else's photo mechanic frankly i've reconfigured my photo mechanic enough times over the years that i'm not even sure what the default condition even looks like anymore so i just kind of don't do that now mind you photo mechanic works perfectly fine right out of the box it's developed by very bright people who know what they're doing and the default configuration is actually terrific and most people who use photo mechanic including me for years never touch the default configuration as i go along here i'll talk about where my configuration probably doesn't match yours and we'll try to cover that you'll also notice in the title bar that my photo mechanic is photo mechanic plus photo mechanic plus is not really even a product yet it's in beta it's a digital asset management enabled version of photo mechanic it's essentially a dam program and photo mechanic put together when used as ordinary photo mechanic it looks exactly the same as regular photo mechanic again by the time you watch this video it's entirely possible that photo mechanic plus has actually been released and is available on the market and frankly folks i really like it when that happens i think that's going to be a good thing so let's take a look here we have a folder full of test images and this is a series of videos i'm doing a video similar to this one in a whole bunch of different sorts of software so that people can glean an understanding of what it's like to do metadata markup in the software that they're likely to use so we have this folder of demo images that we dug up from our garden somehow let's go ahead and apply metadata to them now this is not the only way to do this by any stretch of the imagination photo mechanic even amongst the programs that i cover is extremely flexible there's a lot of ways to do this but hey this will work so let's just go right through it let's just select all these photos that are in this folder so i'm going to go ahead and call my template dialog i'm going to do it with command or control i on the keyboard but you can also go to the image pull down in photo mechanics main menu and call the metadata iptc template and i'm going to load a template here and this is one of our joe photographer sample templates we use in a lot of demos and in fact i'll put a link in the description down below so that you can download this template and you can simply turn it into a template for yourself by following along and changing joe photographer's information to your information joe photographer obviously doesn't exist he is our imaginary photographer he and his sister susie sometimes will use the susie photographer template anyhow this template has all of joe's standing information on it and we can just apply it to these photos in one go by clicking apply template to selected and there we are now we have all the standing information for all of these photos applied just like that so now we can go back to these photos and go ahead and caption them so let's go to this photo for example and now we'll pull up the one at a time iptc metadata editor for photo mechanic and i have a video it's actually my most recent photo mechanic video that explains in detail when to use either one of these editor dialogues but to oversimplify if you're doing metadata on pictures that don't have any metadata either one will work just fine you'll find very obviously and very quickly that the template dialog works with multiple pictures and this one is a one at a time sort of thing but we'll just go ahead and use this one and we'll go ahead and caption some pictures this is an orchid so hey let's make a caption that just simply says it's an orchid and we could do some keywords too we'll okay it and it's fine and then we'll move on to the next picture so here we have two pictures that are a pair this is a raw photo and this is an edited exported version of the same photo obviously these two photos are going to require the same caption information so we're going to do them as a pair it could be a pair it could be a dozen photos if you've done a portrait of somebody the chances are really really good that you can't come up with unique and individual captions for each and every one even if that might be a good thing for seo it's just not practical and besides which it's a bunch of extra work so we're going to go back to our template editor for these particular photos and we're going to do our caption right here and there's a number of ways to do this but i'll do it this way because it kind of is best practice i'll go ahead and clear my template editor i'll go to the caption field and i will set replace to prefix and what this is going to do is allow me to write around the information that i've already put in this photo frankly honestly as long as i have this template selected i can go ahead and write over it anyway because the only information on these particular photos at this particular instant is information from the template but anyway this picture is a rain lily so let's say a rain lily blooms after a shower okay fine it's not the world's greatest caption but it'll do photo mechanic is going to go ahead and put that in front of anything else that already exists in the caption field which in this particular case is joe photographers in line by line that says photo by joe photographer and we can come down here into the keywords field and we can add a keyword for the sake of that argument let's just say that flowers is a nice keyword and you'll notice here that our keywords field is turned on check mark there and here we have a check mark by this little plus sign and what that's going to do is that's going to append this flowers keyword to any other keywords that happen to be there maybe keywords that were put there by the template in any case this means that we can safely work around any other information that may already be in our pictures so below applied to selected and boom we can see here that our rain lily caption is here including joe photographers in line byline and we added that keyword and that's fine and we'll move ahead to the other picture and we'll see that we've done the same thing okay rinse and repeat now do you have to do it in two separate steps mark up every picture with the template and then go back and do captions individually or in small groups could you do it all in one go just bring up a picture like this one bring up the one at a time metadata editor apply your template and then go from there watering the garden absolutely trust me folks this is not a tutorial on writing good captions i'm just trying to make you suffer the least amount possible through my terrible typing and then we can move on now something that we really really need to stress about doing this work with captions and metadata is use your template don't ever fall victim to the temptation to individually type all that repetitive information that's the same on every picture your name your phone number your url the information that we're going to need for the google fields over and over again for one thing it would just be a horrible waste of time and for another thing it just absolutely doesn't work human beings cannot type repetitive information tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times and get it right every time so have a template and use your template every single time that is a really important piece of advice that's maybe the most important piece of metadata advice that i can give you now let's take a look at what's in this template and how this google stuff works so we'll just open this one up and we can see that we have our normal stuff now we put a caption here but the template actually had some information for our caption field it had joe photographers initials in the field that describes who wrote the caption okay that's going to be the same for every picture that show photographer does we have joe photographer's name we have joe photographers copyright notice this particular one's a little stale it's 2018 but when you update this template for your own use feel free to update that and as a matter of fact i have a blog post that shows you how to automate that so that photo mechanic will put the year in for you which is a tremendous thing because if you're like me you think about changing the year probably in about the middle of february so we have joe photographers contact url we have a rights usage terms statement from joe photographer i kind of like that field but i have to warn you that not all software that reads metadata reads it in this particular template joe has actually included a credit joe and susie's studio or susie and joe's studio i'm sorry that's kind of cool if in fact you actually have a studio or you're working for a client let's say you're working for widget co or maybe the more likely circumstance you're working for my favorite imaginary pr agency awesome pr and the photo is going to be distributed on behalf of widget co in which case the credit would be widget co and i should warn you here that many people and some companies nowadays in 2020 want to put their whole byline string their whole credit line string in the credit field and iptc has even given its tacit approval for this the official name of the field in 2020 is credit line so here we would have photo by joe photographer slasher dash or something joe and susie's studio make that susie and joe studio and i don't think that's best practice at all for one thing it's conflating two different pieces of metadata who created the picture and who's responsible for the picture and putting them in the same field think about when you've used a contact program or an office program and first names and last names are stuck in the same field and you have to figure out how to deal with that mess moreover an automated system that publishes this photo is very likely to create the byline by taking the contents of the creator field and concatenating it with the contents of the credit field with a slasher a dash or something in between so if you have your entire credit string in this field and that happens you're going to get a crazy credit line that has your name twice and a bunch of slashes and whatever so if you do use the credit don't fall victim to the temptation to try to put your whole byline in it otherwise in this template we have space holders in the city state and province and country fields you'll probably just want to delete those for your own version and then we have a section of contact information now again the order of these fields and the way this looks in the interface this is one of the cases where i've customized photo mechanic yours won't look like this you can make yours look however you want it to look anyhow here we have joe's contact information that is obviously going to say the same for every picture that joe puts out and by the way we have a space here for a physical address a space for an email address a space for phone numbers and a space for a contact url you might not want to do all of those i know photographers who dutifully fill in every single one of those things because if someone wants to get in touch with them to give them money for a license they absolutely want to make it as easy as possible frankly i'm a little worried about being spammed so i don't put my email address in my template i have my business phone number in most of my templates and in all of them i have the url of my website so let's jump up here into this section of the interface as i have it arranged and look at copyright information here's joe's copyright statement copyright symbol copyright this year joe photographer and he's put his business phone number in there i personally recommend this i think this is a great idea put some rudimentary contact information right here in your copyright field because your copyright field is a field that people are very likely to see if they want to know who the picture belongs to and as we saw this is a field that google is going to show them it's going to be right up front right in their face and if indeed you're in a position where you want to be able to grant people permission to use your photos with or without collecting money from them that's entirely up to you you want to make it really easy for them to get in touch with you so this is a field that we've already seen shows up in google images right in the front along with the creator field which is your name okay fine that's perfectly simple and if you use it and most of us probably will not we have the credit field and now we have this the copyright url field officially in iptc terms this field is called the web statement of rights and if you have a serviceable fully qualified url in this field you will not only get your licensable badge but your licensable badge will click through to the address in this field now joe photographer here when i made this sample template for joe didn't put his fully qualified url according to google's documentation for this to work properly you need to do the whole url including the protocol so https colon slash slash w w dot if in fact that's part of your url joe photographer dot com and just for the sake of it let's go to a certain page on joe's website called licenses there you go so now we have our licensable badge there it is the badge we've got it we're most of the way there now here i suggested that joe direct people who are interested in his pictures to a specific page for licenses now if you read the technical documentation behind the web statement of rights field which pretty much everybody calls in their software the copyright url field it says that there's supposed to be license information on it and some people interpret that to mean a technical recitation of the license that you might offer somebody for this particular picture i don't think we even slightly have to go there because let's face it folks we do not want to have to do this individually for each and every picture and at the time we make a picture and put metadata on it we have actually no idea what sort of license might be available at some future time when somebody dredges it up out of google images and gives us a call so what i've done and i'll recommend this for you too is i've made a landing page on my website for licenses and it's pretty darn simple i mean we're talking here about 15 minutes worth of work probably most of which was finding the banner-shaped image to go under the word licenses bang it tells you that this picture is all rights reserved we don't have to be a hundred percent here but about 99 of the time in my case yeah that's exactly right it's all rights reserved and it says you want to publish the photo just get in touch and we'll work something out there's a contact link and it's the contact link from my website if that doesn't work for you by all means feel free to call me up on my business telephone now when somebody calls it's entirely possible that i might be in the sort of mood where i say hey you're an honest person sure you can have a license for free or it may be a case where it's an editorial use and i refer them to the very nice people at my agency they can work it out maybe i can sell them a license maybe there is no license available maybe this picture's already been bought out or something like that no problem no blood no foul you contact me if that's the case i'll just tell you now a very few of my pictures are licensed under creative commons i have a separate license page for creative commons pictures talked about that in a different video and then there's just a paragraph here where i thank people for coming for being an honest person which is really terrific and that's what we're working towards with all this metadata stuff and with these wonderful developments on google so i think that's kind of a big deal and i think that kind of makes a difference and by the way for this to work properly for you to get that link on google there are a couple conditions that have to be met for one thing you have to put the metadata on your picture for a second thing the metadata still has to be on your picture by the time google gets to it what that means is that whatever website publishes your picture which could very well be your own has to not destroy your metadata and that is and has been a really big problem but that's another piece of good news because in the last couple of years millions of websites that used to destroy metadata have made the socially conscious move to not do it anymore now that includes of course most of the photographer oriented websites photo sharing and portfolio sites like photoshelter or smugmug or zenfolio and most recently the photo oriented web hosting service squarespace has made changes to their programming so they support metadata and if you have a website i urge you to look into the matter find out if your website is supporting metadata or destroying it and if it's the latter take the steps to fix that and there is a lot in my blog about how to do this and for most people with websites i guess i can go ahead and say that so yeah probably for fifty percent plus one of the websites out there in the world if they are destroying metadata it's a very quick and easy fix to fix it it probably just means calling up or chatting with the customer service department at your web provider and they should be able to take care of it and fix it right up for you now let's talk about those other two fields the fields the drive information on google images they're specific to your particular picture and unless you're trying to do some sort of ecommerce solution you don't really even need to use those fields but what the heck they're there let's make them work for us so we'll scroll down here in our iptc information in this particular dialog and we will get down to the bottom to the fields that i don't use very much at all and we'll find a section this is actually an array not just one field but it's an array of fields and it says licensors license sores and we have three little dots now this field may turn up straight away in your dialogue in photo mechanic or it might not show it depends actually on whether or not you've customized the dialogue if you've customized the dialogue you're going to have to go and turn this field on which i will show you how to do in just a moment if we click the three little dots the array opens and we have all these subfields for this field the two that we really care about are this one the url the licensor url same deal we'll put oops just two p's we'll probably do it let's put chose url in here and we'll direct people to that same landing page that licensing landing page it'll do just fine you don't have to send people to a different place or a place that's particular for this particular picture you can if you want to but you don't have to and since joe photographer is the licensor we'll put joe photographer's name in here and out of our undying respect for joe i'll even capitalize it correctly and you know what let's put some contact information because what the heck it's not going to hurt and we have the opportunity right there click ok and that information is there but we need to save it into our template now we can do that from this one at a time iptc metadata dialog or we can do it in the template dialog it works exactly the same way and the results are exactly the same the templates are shared between the two dialogues and while yes you can export a template by just hitting the save button and you can export the template out to an xmp template file what most people do most of the time to save a template is they simply click the lightning bolt which is the snapshot button in photomechanic and they go up to save and they choose the template that they want to save or to give it a name if they want to make a new one and say okay fine save the template and say yes and we'll dismiss that yeah i want to save the changes and we will dismiss that dialog and we'll jump back over here to our template editor and we can scroll down in this dialog in my case i put it down here pretty near the bottom because i really never have to go here but here we have the licensors array and i have the button to open it up and i can add license information and let's load the template that i just did and we should actually see the information that actually exists in this template so there we go there it is all right good to go so what if you don't see the licensers array in your interface okay fine we'll close the template we'll jump over to photo mechanics preferences we'll use the pull down to hop down to the accessibility page yeah i would have thought it would be on the iptc page too but hey that's just the way it works and we have here customize and we have one button for each of the two dialogs this one is for the template editor this one is for the one at a time editor now in this case we have to do this once for each editor templates are shared between the editors but this is the actual configuration of the actual editor itself and in this thing you'll have a list of all the fields that appear or can appear in those dialogues so we'll just have to scroll down through this list and we will have to find the licensors field or the licensors array and we just make sure that it's checked both to be enabled and to be visible i have a dialog that talks about using this dialog extensively i will tell you one little detail that's really important from that that could mess you up don't disable any fields unless you really really know what you're doing most photographers most of the time 99 99 of the time want to leave all the fields enabled if you disable a field not only will photomechanic not show it in the dialog and not let you write to it it'll actually erase it if there's any information in that field you probably don't care but if you do care you probably care a lot after you have arranged this dialogue to get the dialogue in your interface to look the way you want it to look it's got a snapshot button so just go right ahead and save the snapshot do one and then do the other and let's see we know that it's on the left side as i have this dialog arranged let's see if we can find it here it is right here here's the licensers field and yeah it's only one row deep because it is only one row deep and we just turned it on and that's all we have to do same thing after you get done configuring your dialogue go right ahead and save the snapshot and you'll be good to go so i'll cancel back out of there and that's basically it that's as easy as it is to apply metadata to a whole bunch of photos in photo mechanic in one go you'll get the benefit of those great google features actually you'll get the benefit of those great google features at the first step and in photo mechanic you can configure the program to automatically put that information on every single picture you pull down from your camera's cards so when i say it's zero work it's literally zero work i don't do it that way and you probably don't want to do it that way either it seems to me to sort of be cluttering things up to put my metadata on every single frame including the ones that i discard or maybe don't work up or maybe don't publish but that's all up to you there's a million ways to use this program it's really powerful it's really fast and you can do the socially conscious thing which is also the best thing for you without really breaking into much of a sweat at all so it's all around a pretty good deal as always jump in the comments down below jump in the comments on my blog or reach out in social media if you need more information about photo mechanic there's a playlist on this channel there's a bunch of posts on the blog so you should be able to find out what you need to know and if you don't there are those comments reach out and i'll be really happy to help as i record this we're in the middle of a pandemic so please folks be careful stay safe out there and until next time mind your metadata