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hello everybody and welcome I hope you're all as excited as I am to be here this is the highlight of our year you know one of the great things about roots Tech is that if fosters connection with people and that was just brought home to me just a couple minutes ago I went to sit down for a minute catch my breath and started talking to this Level II lady in the front row it turns out we went to the same high school her sister was in my high school class in Boulder Colorado so this is what we're here for is to make connections my name is Allison Taylor and my husband Tom and I have a company called pictures and stories we write and design and produce personal and family history books I've been working in the digital photography industry for many many years and so today I'm going to talk about metadata and how that can help you to to make sure that the information that people for your photos have the information that they need to know who they are we're going to talk about the importance of that so to underscore that I'm going to play a little video for you it's very short about a minute and a half [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] sad but true I'm sorry to do that to you but to think how I feel seriously most of the photos in this video are ones that I have inherited I found them in a box in my grandmother's house or a trunk in my dad's house and they have nothing written on the back there's no identifying information so I know they're a part of my family or at least friends of the family but I don't know who they are and everybody who could tell me who they are most of those people are gone so this is why it's so important for us to be able to understand how to get that identifying information into a digital photograph because we are in a digital world like it or not okay first of all what is metadata it just means data about data okay and we've actually been using metadata for hundreds of years with photography already you can see this is kind of old-school metadata some creative ways that people found to identify their photos and tell who's in them then we move to paper prints where we could write on the back of the print or sometimes on the front this picture on the right that's my grandmother there at the far right in this picture and it's kind of faded so it's hard to see there's some writing at the top that for years I could not figure out what it said it looked like it said black herring lids and I was like what is that is that like some secret society and other kind of dress weird was it like some group that she was in or something and then just recently I looked at it again and I realized that it said black burying time without it but she's still black burying wrong so so handwriting is not always reliable let's just say okay so now that everything is going digital how do we write on the back of a digital photo that's what we're talk about today okay here are some kind of low ich tag ways to do it the image on the left is from Amy Johnson crow who's presenting here this week and I thought this was a pretty good way if you just can't deal with adding the metadata in digitally you can actually scan it with a piece of paper that has the information on it so at least if you're scanning a print you can add some data that way but it may not be the optimal thing way to do it one thing you don't want to do is open up your photographs in Photoshop or some other photo editing software and type the information directly on the photo because if you make it smaller or bigger it can make it unreadable so metadata is information about a photo that is embedded and becomes a part of the photo and in the best case scenario travels with the photo when it's stored when it's shared when it's copied or when it's uploaded to a website you can think of the photograph as being the motorcycle in this picture okay and the metadata goes into the sidecar that's attached to the motorcycle okay so today we're going to talk I'm going to tell you a few options you have for putting in some basic metadata in very basic easy ways there are a lot of different ways to do it I'm just going to show you a couple and tell you some things to watch out for okay there are a couple of different kinds of metadata there's more than two but these are the only two you really need to worry about and you don't need to remember what it stands for XF is exchangeable image file IPTC stands for International Press telecommunications coms Council which you don't ever have to remember that again but IPTC is the data that you are going to be concerning yourself with that is the user editable data that you can go in and type into your photo the Exadata is kind of what gets captured by your digital cameras got things like the data photos taken the location the shutter speed and that kind of thing on your camera so if you if you have trouble remembering which is which i think of IPTC as standing for i put this in my computer so if you need it's lame but it works okay so the kind of things that we can put into IPTC metadata are a title of a photo caption and descriptive just destruct just never mind I'm not even going to try to say that descriptive information tags keywords search capabilities copyright information the author or artists and contact information which is I'll talk about why that's important in a minute so the problem is that metadata seems a lot more confusing than it actually is because even though there's a standard that's been set up for what types of things can be embedded into a photo different software programs that you might be using with your photos mate show different parts of the metadata they might hide some and show others or they might even call it different things on one you can type it in and it might be a caption and on something else that says it calls it as a description so it makes it seem really confusing but it's actually not that hard so I want to start off by taking you on a little metadata journey so you can see what will happen to the metadata that goes along with this photo okay this is George Knightley the third and his wife Emma and their dog Harriet I didn't mean I was almost finished with this presentation before I notice that there is actually a dog in the picture he's actually holding a dog but it kind of blends in with this coat this took me a long time to see that so we're going to we're going to follow George and Emma on this journey and find out what happens to their metadata okay so I just scanned this photo and I've opened it in Photoshop just because I happen to have Photoshop open there are a lot of ways you could do it and I have typed in some information I type in a title and description I've put in my name and I I put in my contact information my email address I've also put in a couple of search tags so that I can maybe search if I want to bring up later on all of the photos of Emma Knightley it will find this and show it to me now I have added my email address in here because I want if someone else is going to download this photo at some point from a website and they want they have more questions about it and they want to be able to contact me I want them to have a way that they can contact me or if they want to share information with me about this photo but that's up to you you don't have to put that in there if you're concerned about privacy but I think it's a really great idea to put an email address in there okay so the next thing I do is I decide I want to upload this photo to FamilySearch and I'll talk a little bit about how metadata relates to family search in a minute okay and then I decide you know I also want to send this to somebody else so here I am in Utah and George and Emma I have uploaded the family search and I also decide that I'm going to email this to my aunt because I think she might like to see it so I sent her an email I attach the photo to the email and send it off to my aunt who lives in Colorado now she opens the photo from her email on her Mac and she looks at it in her Photos app on her Mac and she can see the title that I've entered in there but she doesn't see my contact information or anything else that's kind of all she can see is the title and description so this sort of shows you how depending upon what you open it in some of it might show some of it might not okay now she uses ancestry.com to store her stuff so she's going to upload this picture to ancestry to attach it to her tree in the meantime I have another cousin in Ohio who downloads the photo that I've uploaded to family search and opens it in Photoshop and she can see pretty much everything I put in there because we use the same program okay here's another random guy in California finds that photo my aunt uploaded two ancestry and he downloads it he opens it up in Lightroom which is a program that he uses for his photographs he can see both my title and my contact information okay even though my aunt was the one that uploaded that photo from her Mac where she couldn't see the contact information that contact information was still there in the sidecar and so when he downloaded it from ancestry he could see it because his program can see that part of the metadata okay this makes him very very happy so happy he decides his sister would also like to see this so he uploads it to his Dropbox account which is where he likes to store his photos and he shares the Dropbox folder with his sister in Florida okay when she opens it up in Dropbox she doesn't see that there's any metadata attached to it because Dropbox doesn't have a field that shows metadata but that's okay because the information is still there so if she opens it in a different program or if she downloads it onto her computer she'll be able to see that metadata okay no okay and I'm going to I'm going to tell you the methods really shortly here some of the methods so the sister in Florida she likes to store her photos in Google photos so she takes the photo that she's downloaded loaded from her brother's Dropbox and she uploads it to her Google photos and if you can see in the little blue the top left corner to screen their top right corner she can actually see the description that I typed in on the photo a while back in Google photos because Google photos have it has an info tab and if there's metadata in there it will show in info tab you can't add metadata in Google photos but you can view some of it okay so and this is my favorite part of the story there's some random guy in England who is doing a Google search looking for some members of his family in his Google search he comes across this photo that I have uploaded two familysearch and he's pretty excited line it up my granddad and so he he gets really excited he opens it this is in he's looking on his iPhone I think in a metadata app on his iPhone and he sees my email address he's excited because he wants to contact me because he has records on this family that go all the way back to the Doomsday Book and so he wants to be able to share those with me and I'm thrilled because I get to see these records and I get to meet a cousin that I didn't know I had who have happens to have a cottage in Cornwall and invites my family to come and spend the summer in their cottage in Cornwall which is great because I'm a huge Poldark fan so so you can see what can happen just by taking a few extra seconds to add the metadata into your photo not only are you saving this information for future generations so that these people won't be invisible and anonymous but you could also maybe get a free vacation out of it okay so I just want to show you a couple of basic ways how to get that information into the sidecar okay there are many many different ways to do this and we'll talk about a few and I'll give you some some of my recommendations and what I like to use depending upon what platform you have and what you're trying to accomplish and they range from being very simple and free to complicated and expensive and not always at the same time okay I just want to mention very quickly this isn't a plug really but I will be putting the step-by-step instructions on our blog it's a non-commercial blog we don't have any ads you don't have to type in anything but if you go to pictures and stories com click on the blog tab and you can do a put in the search panel you can put metadata and this post will pop up so you'll be able to see a lot of the stuff from this presentation there's also a syllabus in your routes tech app give me a couple of days but it might take me a couple days to get that up there so I'm going to start off with what I think is the easiest possible way to get metadata into your photos okay so if I can see by a show of hands how many people in here use a PC for most of your photo organization stuff okay good number of hands how many people are using a Mac computer okay also a good number how many people are exclusively using like an iPad or a phone to manage your digital photos okay not too many of you how about is there anybody who's just not technological at all okay that's okay because that's what teenagers are for okay so find your 12 year old grandson or your 8 year old granddaughter for that matter and they will be able to help you with this it's important okay so this is the easiest thing in the world if you are on in a Windows system this happens to be Windows 10 File Explorer which is the basic Windows kind of way you get around Windows if you click on a photo you go to where that wherever that photo is on your computer and you click on that you can see and I don't have a pointer on this so in the left corner of the screen on the left top you notice there's a little blue highlighted thing called the details pane okay usually on the right side of the screen the right side of the window you'll just see a preview picture of that picture but if you click on that details pane you can see all this other information that goes with the photo you can see marked and blue that there's a place that says title it has contact or author in this particular case and you can add tags so I can actually go right in that details pane without even opening up the photo I can go in and I can type that in and I can click Save and the metadata is in there that's it that's all there is that easier than you thought it okay that is I think the easiest way to do it you can kind of do it one at a time so I'll show you some other ways as well now you can also do the same thing if you right-click on that photo and go to the properties tab and go to details you'll also have that screen and you can view metadata that's already in there or you can add metadata of your own save it and you're done and that's it you have metadata that is now attached to that photo if you're still on Windows 7 it will pretty much works the same way you can use the properties right-click and choose properties or on the windows 7 screen you can see down at the bottom there's a little tab a little toolbar that comes up at the bottom and if you have your window open wide enough on the screen that will pop up and you can actually go and just click right on there where it's the tags or title and you can click you can type that information in there the easiest thing in the world okay so for those of you who are using a mac not quite that easy but that's okay well we can deal with that okay and that's partly because Apple kind of they don't always want to play nice with other systems so it just makes it a little bit more difficult so usually if you're on a Mac computer ok and you double click on a photo it'll usually open it up in preview now you can see this one this is my version that I already added metadata to and it shows I can see a title and a description in there and but it shows me the Creator but it doesn't show copyright information or anything else so it's got some limited metadata that shows up here ok I can also go and use command I and that will open the info panel for that image and that will also show the metadata that I have typed in there one thing I wanted to point out about the there is a comment field in that info panel if you type information in there it does not embed in the photo and it doesn't go anywhere I had to learn that the hard way a few years ago so just be aware that if you type things in the comments field you'll be able to see them on your system when you open that photo but if you copy it or share it or do anything with it that information will not travel with it so it's not a great metadata it's not actually a metadata field no no yeah hmm I'm sorry yeah she was she was asking if that's also true with a Windows system and it is not you can type information in the comments field on in Windows and if the the viewing software that you're using shows that window you'll be able to see that but on a Mac for some reason that comments field is disconnected from the metadata so I just wanted to go to where be aware of that ok so the problem is is that if you have a photo that you want to add metadata to that's blank it doesn't have any metadata and you try to open it in preview the problem is that those fields are have it have disappeared so it doesn't give you a blank field where you can add in a title and a creator and caption information ok so you have to use a different way you can view some metadata with the preview but that you can't add any in there if you are using a computer or a laptop on a Mac you can use the Photos app to enter a little bit of metadata you can see here I've got a blank screen when I go to the info panel or some blank fields that I can fill in a title and a description and some keywords but no contact information so that's a little bit of a limitation and I want to think that this is going to improve over time the problem is that a lot of these apps these Mac apps have been getting simpler and less functional rather than and I understand why they do that but but I think the trend is for them to simplify not to add functionality so I'm not holding my breath that it's going to get easier in the Mac operating software if you have a Mac don't feel like you have to run out and buy a PC just add your metadata I'm going to show you some other ways to do this ok this is androids are basically it's going to be basically the same as what you do in a PC and that totally depends on the software that you're using not on the device itself so it doesn't matter too much whether you have an Android or a pixel phone or whatever iPhones are a little different they have their own maxy so we're going to show some third-party apps if you have a Mac that will make this easier you can also use these third-party apps on Android phones okay and one thing to know is that the Mac Photos app does not you cannot view or add any metadata on an iPad or an iPhone only on the computer so okay here's just what to look for if you want to go to the App Store and you're going to download some kind of app to be able to record metadata first of all check the reviews if it has one star don't buy it because you're going to be wasting your three dollars okay make sure that the app will let you record the IPTC data there are a lot of metadata apps out there that only allow you to change the exif data like to change the date that it shows under your photo or the location not to add additional information and likely every device that you want to do this one you're going to need a different app for that device but the good news is they're only like usually three to five dollars so you're not out a lot of money this is one and there are tons of them out there that do that this is one that I found called photo meta edit and this I can use on my Mac computer it was three dollars and 99 cents and it's pretty basic but it seems I work just fine there's one called photo investigator that I got for my iPad and also works on an iPhone again it's pretty basic I think this one was $2.99 and it works just fine okay what I want to show you next is my favorite way to enter metadata okay it's a little bit more complicated but it also does a lot more and it's free okay so this is called Adobe bridge and as I said it's free this totally looks like a guy in my ward okay disclaimer I do not work for Adobe okay and I'm not trying to sell anything that Adobe does however I just think this is a great program and it's the only program that Adobe offers for free to anyone and that's not just a free trial you don't have to put your credit card number in it is free free free you can just go anybody can go to the website and download it and they didn't use to they used to sell it they used to bundle it with Photoshop so when you bought Photoshop you got the bridge for free but now anybody can go and you don't have to use it with Photoshop you can use it with any program and tom was kind of wondering why would they just give it away like that I personally think it's kind of a gateway drug to Adobe products so I figure oh you're going to like this so much you're going to want to buy a bunch of other ones so free there are no strings attached it works on either platform so it works on either Mac or it works on a PC and you can also download a mobile version that will work on an iPad or it'll work on your Android phone or it'll work on your iPhone so it and they have been around for a long time so it's not buggy they know what they're doing you can use it in conjunction with any photo editing software Photoshop paint shop pro whatever you like to use or none and you can add metadata to multiple photos at once which is really nice if you have a big group of stuff and you want to add your contact information to all of it you can do that all at the same time and you can customize your workflow it's really nice you can move things around on the screen and have it have your screen look exactly the way you want it so that it works out the best for you so I'm going to close out of this presentation just for a moment here and I'm actually going to attempt to show you how this works quickly in real time so I'm going to open up fridge on my computer like I said this is on the Mac but I also have this on my PC at home which is what I use for for most of my stuff I have three monitors on my desk the right-hand monitor is completely dedicated to bridge I have this program open on my monitor 24/7 all the time and I use it all day every day pretty much all right so now you can see up in the upper corner up here I have two versions of my photo all right this is what the bridge looks like essentially and I'm just looking at all these photos that are in this folder that I have now I clicked on this first version of it and I can see over here it's got my name and my email address in the creator field it's got my email address in there again it's got a description it's got the keywords I can see everything and this is what I use to actually also type in the metadata so I'm going to go to the blank version okay and let's say that I'm going to add I just want to add a description I just click on that okay just put my information in there and I can go to the next field if I want I can just put whatever information I want in there I'm going to click this little check mark down to the bottom make sure it's all saved okay and that's it I'm done I can also select a whole range of photos or I can select all if like everything in the folder and you can see here where it says multiple values this means it has different information in each one let's say that I want to put my name as the creator of this whole range of photos all these photos that I have selected I do that and now every one that I click on has my name in there okay easy right you can move these windows around you can increase the font size which is great if you have eyes that are getting older okay so that's it super easy No yes that information is still there okay and I'm going to leave a lot of time for questions at the yet - so hang on to your question if you have any and we will get to that all right let me play this again okay so there are some more expensive and more complicated programs that you can get the deal with metadata and you think well why if I can get that great program for free why would I want to spend more net money to do it but there is there are some reasons why you would want to in order to I just need to get my sorry I'm just going to get my presenter in your back again or maybe not let's just hit play and move on okay so there are some reasons why you would want to invest some money in other programs and I'm just going to go through those really quickly there are basically three different kinds of photo organization software out there okay and there's a reason I'm telling you what these three versions are because they handle metadata differently the first kind is what's just basically an image viewer it allows you to look at the photos that you have okay it doesn't automatically organize them for you it relies on the organization that you have set up in your computer and you can usually do some minor editing with some of them Adobe bridge is an image viewing program you can do some minor things with it but it's basically not organizing them for you finder on the max I'll Explorer in Windows there's a popular freeware software called in front view which a lot of people use those are examples of image viewers okay the second type is called non-destructive editing and organizing software this is also referred to as photo libraries or photo databases and you would think well of course I want something that's non-destructive I don't want to destroy my photos that's not quite what it means and there are some good things about this and there are not so good things about it I personally don't use a library program I prefer to use bridge and as an image viewer but for some people they really like them and they make a lot of sense so I'm not saying that you shouldn't use that there are some free ones that have limited editing capabilities they're basically just there to kind of organize your photos the Photos app on both Mac and Windows acts as a really simple kind of organizational database for your photos and it will it will group them into albums or into collections according to where they were shot or who's in the photo if you're using facial recognition software a lot of these databases have that in there it will group them together according to what it thinks how it thinks you might want to have them organized by day iPhoto and Picasa are both programs that are no longer supported but those are kind of really popular versions of database usually free database software there are some more expensive versions of the database software non-destructive that do extensive editing they basically combine the qualities of Photoshop with an organizational database Lightroom Adobe Lightroom is one of those another popular one is called a CDC photo mechanic it used to be aperture on the Mac they've discontinued that but if you're familiar with that usually how you know that you have a database software instead of just an image viewer is that it requires you to import the photos that you want to into the database okay and what it does is that when you make edits hang on to that questions just for one second when you make edits it will keep those versions like if you have maybe a color version then you want to do a version of black and white and maybe you want to do a cropped version it will keep each version separately but it also keeps your original intact so you can always go back to that if you want to and it keeps all these different versions in the software which is great because it makes you run faster it creates less room and makes more room on your on your disk but and that's why they call it non-destructive editing because it leisure original intact when you do editing on it okay Lightroom is an example of this so this is what the Lightroom and you can see the metadata fields over on the right where they have highlighted in blue they look some kind of very similar to the Adobe bridge but in Lightroom I actually have to import my photos into the database okay you can see at the bottom hopefully that there is a there's an import and export feature on there Lightroom costs about $10 a month bundled with Photoshop so if you get that from Adobe so it's you know that adds up but it can do a lot of things you can do a lot of editing that you would do in Photoshop but it's just kind of easier if you don't want to have the learning curve in Photoshop this is the main thing you need to know if you want to use a database type photo organization software like Lightroom like photos on your Mac like the Photos app on your Windows machine is that in order for it to keep your metadata you have to export that photo to a new file name in order for it to save that version on your hard drive as a separate file that means that what happens is that if I if I open this photo in lightroom i add the metadata the the photo the basic photo unedited without the mated metadata is still on my hard drive so if I go to my hard drive and then drag the photo up into family search that metadata is not going to go with it so I have to export it to photo a slash metadata or some you need to give it a new file name then it will save the metadata with that and that's the one that I have to upload so I just want to make sure that you're aware of that because if you spend a lot of time putting all that metadata in and then you drag those photos from your hard drive over into family search or whatever it that'd eight it may not go with it so just wanted you to be aware of that okay the third type is just cloud photo storage and some of them have organizational capacities and some don't these would be things like Google photos Dropbox iCloud photo etc generally if you are going to share photos from any of these cloud storage things you need to add the metadata in a program before you upload it to the cloud storage because most of them don't have a way to add metadata while it's there in the cloud okay just a couple other really quick settings and then I will open it up for questions when you are dealing with Family Search and ancestry you want to add your metadata before you upload it to Family Search you know when you go to upload you upload a photo to Family Search memories right and there's a little place where you add the title and then there's another place where you add the description ok and then you can go in and you can tag the faces on your photo that's a great and wonderful thing and that information is all in family search however if somebody at least at this point if somebody downloads that photo from family search all of that lovely descriptive information that you type in the family search does not come with the photo on to that person's computer who's downloading it ok so but if you add the metadata in a photo program before you upload it to Family Search I wish it would take your metadata that you've added in and automatically populate those fields in the family search but it doesn't do that you have to type in that the title and the description everything again but when someone downloads that file the metadata will be there with the photo and they will still have that information so it's a little bit of a two-step process you kind of have to add that information in and twice ok all right so this just shows you know if I want to drag it into a gallery this I where it says George and Emma Knightley arrived in New York that I have actually had to type in there in the family search window because otherwise it just says add title even if the metadata is in there you have to retype it in again okay and so whatever you type in a family search is independent of the metadata that you have attached to that photo one other thing that's really important that I want you to know how to do when you are downloading downloading a photo from family search and that is you can see this window here where it shows the title and you see kind of a smaller version of the photo and it's got your description on the right this is also would be where your the where the connections to your family tree would show up on the right here if you right-click and save as this smaller version of the photo from this screen you will not get the metadata with it furthermore you will get a smaller version of the original photo this is basically a large thumbnail so what you need to do instead if you're going to download something off a family search you need to go to this little click on the details button that has the I on it and then click view original ok and then it will give you the larger version of the photo you are looking at the original photograph that someone has uploaded to family search and when you download that from this screen if you right click and save as you will get the metadata along with the photo ok does that make sense I just want to make sure that was clear ok couple last little things about metadata if you put in your copyright information for images that you own it's not going to guarantee you legal protection but it might help at least if you make people aware that you are the owner of this photo it might prevent them from from using that necessarily or but the other thing you have to know about metadata is that anybody can go in and erase it so there is no way at least at this point in time to make permanent metadata permanently a part of your photograph someone can always go in and change it or erase it if they want to so just be aware of that social media unfortunately at least the State and time if you upload a photo with all your beautiful metadata into Facebook and somebody else downloads that from Facebook no metadata okay it strips it out and I haven't checked that with every social media outlet out there but I would imagine most of them do also a lot of blogging platforms and some websites will also strip the metadata from your photos so just be aware of that and make sure that if you are uploading photos to share with other people that you don't just do it in photo in Photoshop or in Photoshop in Facebook or in other social media apps that you also are sharing with genealogy sites you're sharing with other people that you know and maybe using a genealogy specific program to do that also test your method before you add a huge bunch of metadata to a lot of images do one or two with the software that you've chosen and try uploading it somewhere and then downloading again try sending it to a couple of friends and make sure that the amount of data is coming across the way that you wanted to because you don't want to spend hours typing in all this information and then find out that it really doesn't go anywhere which is kind of what happened to me a few years ago with typing in comments into a Mac thinking that was a metadata field and it turns out that it wasn't so just test it a couple of times adding metadata is it's an imperfect technology at this point in time I think not in a not too distant future I think there will be when you buy a digital camera for instance you will be able to actually type that information on the photo right into your camera or right into your smart phone as you capture it which makes things so much easier but right now most of these manufacturers are not on board however I think that's going to improve I just saw talked briefly with a gentleman from who was part of the innovator summit he has a program called chroma with a cue starts with a cue which basically uses works only on an iPhone but basically it uses voice recognition software so that you can speak your metadata descriptions into and locations and other things into your phone and it will record that into the metadata so I think that as those kind of things improve it's going to be a lot easier to do that but right now it just takes a little bit of extra time and diligence to be able to add your metadata in there so to protect your photos you just want to make sure that you scan them properly at a high resolution so they can be used for different purposes add the metadata share on genealogy sites share them with your family make sure everybody in the family has copies of your metadata photos and that way if somebody loses theirs and someone else has a copy and also you want to keep a copy both on physical and in cloud storage so that if you only have all your photos on that one computer that's sitting in your house and your house burns down you're losing all of that if you only have it in the cloud and that cloud company goes out of business then you might be in trouble too so you want to make sure that you have a balance that you have a backup between both physical and cloud storage all right thank you so much if you have any questions I'm happy to answer a matter thank you