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hello i'm carl sibert thanks for joining me in photo mechanic we have two iptc metadata editors in this video we'll look at the two editors and what we can do with each one here's the first metadata editor this one is called metadata iptc info it's pretty simple it reads existing metadata on an image allows you to edit it make it whatever you want it to be and then when you click ok it writes it back to the image we could refer to this one as the regular or basic metadata editor frankly it's the only one that i used for the first several years that i used photo mechanic it took me quite a while before i even really discovered that there was another metadata editor you'll notice that i called it by clicking the i button on this photo i could have used the i key on my keyboard just as well the other metadata editor this one is called iptc template or excuse me metadata iptc template it used to be called before photo mechanic six the stationary pad now stationary pad was kind of a strange name what the heck does that mean some users complained about it well okay it was a point well taken really so photo mechanic renamed it they now call it the template editor and that's what i'll call it for the purposes of this video i don't think the template editor is such a great name either because it's sort of descriptive but not really yes you can edit templates in this metadata editor you can edit templates just totally fine in the other one as well but the reality is you can do a lot of stuff with this one that you can't do with the other one and some things the other way around as far as the name goes who cares we could call these things ben and jerry if we want it's what they do it's not what they're called so let's go back to the basic metadata editor this is the metadata editor and i'll call it this time with the i key just for the sake of variety that we would use if we're pick captioning one picture or some pictures from scratch it works just pretty much the way you would expect it to work which is in fact the way photoshop or a text editor pretty much any other sort of editor works you open a file you do something to the file you save the file and there you go so if we were captioning this picture of this flower we would start by applying a template to it and this is an actual picture that i actually took which doesn't make it a great picture it just makes it a picture but we'll apply my regular real template to this picture and we would write a caption for this picture and i'll paste it so that you don't have to watch me type if we wanted to we could add some keywords to this picture that might be a good idea and depending on our workflow we might have to do a headline or an object name or some other metadata stuff when we're done we could just hit ok and start over again with the next picture or if we wanted to we could use a button and save what we've done on this picture and move ahead to the next picture let's go ahead and do that we'll go back to our original rose picture here we'll copy the metadata we'll save and move ahead to the next picture that's this one you can see here in this tiny little thumbnail we'll just paste in our metadata and since these two pictures are siblings of each other actually parent child this one is the camera raw file and this one is an edit that jpeg made from it so they can have exactly the same caption but if we wanted to change the caption we could do it easily enough just right over the old with the new and then save and then move on okay great but what we've done here is we've actually surfaced one of the limitations of this particular editor that method that i just demonstrated caption a picture copy the metadata onto the next picture re-edit the caption maybe re-edit a couple other fields and then move on is a tried and true workflow but it's got some limitations and in this particular case we have one if we look right down here and we're now on the camera raw version of this particular picture the raf file we look at the trans ref field job id transref whatever you want to call it and here we have in that field the file name of the first picture that we looked at the file name that has underscore selects appended to it and it's a jpeg picture well the picture that we're looking at right now has a different file name it has this file name which is the same camera imposed string of letters and numbers and it's a raf file so it has dot raf at the end certainly not the same thing what happened well when i ingest my pictures into photo mechanic at the very beginning straight off the camera card i use a variable to have photo mechanic print the original camera file name in the transref field i found that to be really pretty handy and if you take this picture over here for an example we'll move this out of the way here we have sample jpeg it has no caption it has no keywords that's all it has is a file name and if all i had was that file name i would have a heck of a time finding my way back to the raw original so i did this clever little piece of workflow that puts the file name in the trans-ref field we talked about that in a different video but if i simply copy and paste metadata from one picture to another i'm going to pick up all the metadata from the original picture with the exception of the timestamp photomechanic parses the timestamp from the exif data or from the file header data for every picture individually you can't copy and paste that but everything else all the iptc fields including this one it copies and pastes and just like photoshop or microsoft word or any other sort of editor that works this way whatever's in the file when you save is what you're going to have so i just copied and pasted this transref from one file to another well that's one thing that can go wrong when you use this editor what if we just wanted to work with a whole bunch of photos all at once in a batch so as it turns out the other metadata editor the metadata template editor can fix this for us the metadata template editor is meant to work with multiple images at once unlike its sibling it can't read existing metadata at least not directly anyway there is a way this is photo mechanic after all and we'll come back to it and it can work around metadata that already exists in target images so let's take this thing for a spin we'll go ahead and load a template into it we'll use the joe photographer sample template that we've used in so many videos notice that working with templates in this editor is exactly the same as working with templates in the other editor go to the snapshot button choose a template click on it you're good to go if you have information in the editor you can save that information into a template right here in the snapshot dialog or you can use the save and load buttons to export your template as an xmp file to share it or back it up and you can backup snapshot files dot snap files the same way just go to manage snapshots in the snapshot dialog and your file manager operating system file manager will open to the correct folder for the snapshot settings for that particular dialog and you can copy them you can back them up you can delete them you can share them with other copies of photo mechanic whatever you want to do all of that works exactly the same in both editors also all this information in the pull down lists for both editors is the same information it's shared the templates are shared this information is shared so yes this is called the template editor but both of them really edit templates just fine so let's close this for a minute and by the way once you've loaded this it's sticky you can open and close it to your heart's content the same information will stay on it and let's select these pictures that have something to do with records or musical instruments or whatever i'll go ahead and reopen the template editor i did that with command i i also could do that by going up here to the main menu and i could do metadata ipcc template from there we open the editor and we'll click here to apply joe's template to all of these pictures there's yet another way that we can do this we can also right click on the picture and we can apply metadata template whatever template is currently loaded in the template editor will be applied so now assuming we don't have any problems with clever guys like me putting unique information in the pictures before we even start to work on them we can go back to our regular iptc metadata editor which we can call with the i key or we can call it with the i button on the thumbnail in the contact sheet and by the way you can call this editor with the i key even if you're in the preview window in photomechanic anyhow now that we're here we can add a caption and once again i won't make you watch me type and then we can move on to the next picture and we can repeat the process but wait a minute let's go back and let's look at this caption that we just added here like many captions there is a second sentence in this caption that adds context as well as the photographer's inline byline it'd be kind of cool if we could take this second sentence that's in this caption and go ahead and add it to the rest of the musical instrument pictures in one go well let's see if we can do that i'll go ahead and copy it to the clipboard and we can dismiss this and let's see here let's select the pictures that we want to apply it to there's that one that's a musical instrument and we'll say this microphone here is a musical instrument as well we'll bring our template editor back i'll go ahead and clear the template editor and you may have noticed when i did that that we have all these tick boxes next to every field in the template editor and i'll put joe's starter template back in here and the tick box is ticked next to every field that has information in it if i untick the tick box the tick box essentially turns that field off and on if i untick a tick box that field will be turned off this is probably the biggest difference between the two editors in the template editor i can turn fields on and off and if i turn a field off that field won't do anything regardless of what might be in the target image so i just clicked off the city and state here if the target image has something in the city or state fields my turning these fields off in the template editor means the template editor will skip over those fields in other words i can work around existing metadata by just turning the fields off and it won't overwrite it if i go back to the normal metadata editor it doesn't work that way the normal metadata editor mows down everything in its path if for instance in this particular case the keywords field is blank if i save a template that looks like this that has no keywords over a picture it will blank out the keywords field it'll delete everything in the keywords field and essentially write an empty keywords field a lot of times that's useful behavior that's exactly what you want to do you want to write in your new metadata and if there's old metadata in the way you really just want to get rid of it but look at what happens here i'll go ahead and clear this again and as you can see i've taken all of the data out of all of these fields and photomechanic has turned the fields off and we look at our caption field let's turn the caption field back on and let's paste this information that we want to paste into these two new photos right here and then next to our tick box in the caption field we have a little pull down with this pull down we have three choices we can replace whatever might be already existing in the caption field with what we've put in here or we can prefix or append in other words we can save whatever is existing already in the caption and we can add what we have here in front of it or behind it so we have some interesting possibilities so let's go ahead since there's nothing in this field in the two pictures that we're talking about that have musical instruments in them we'll go ahead and we'll apply this caption right there and as you can see if we go back to the regular editor the one that can read existing metadata there we go we now have what we just wrote in the caption field for the sake of illustration let's say that we have noticed right now and and we did really that joe photographer didn't really complete his byline he didn't add the credit to the byline so let's put a slash and we'll say that joe is working for widgetco llc all right let's clean everything else out of here and we'll just add the slash and widget co llc we'll look make sure that all of our other fields are turned off we'll set this to append and those pictures are still selected so we'll just go ahead and apply to selected i don't even really need to open this because you can see it on the thumbnail we've now appended widgetco the credit to joe photographer to make a proper credit line for joe and of course now if we want to we can go back in the regular metadata iptc info editor and we can add proper individual captions to each one of these pictures okay so we'll just okay that so okay remember how i painted myself in the corner with that clever hack about adding the original file name to every picture so i could find my way back to the original picture no matter if i change the file name remember that well let's see if we can use our template editor to caption these pictures and get around that and maybe even make the caption process a little bit easier so we'll go ahead and select the two pictures and we'll open our template editor and we'll notice that our template editor has whatever we had in it the last time it's sticky that's very useful but it's not what we want now so we'll just go ahead and clear that and we'll notice something else as we've done that the caption is now set to append so let's just set that back to the default which is replace and we'll go ahead and load the template editor with my standard template okay so that's good and this is a picture of a red hibiscus of some sort and a red hibiscus is a hibiscus rosa synesis do i know that no i absolutely don't i just copied and pasted it from wikipedia let us look over here at the transref field and we can see right there the file name variable in the transref field that's the way my template is set up and if i apply this template using the other iptc editor this field will be switched on all the fields are on all the time in the other editor and the template will apply the variable and photo mechanic will substitute the variable with the file name that's not what i want to do here and in fact this template as called in this editor has the job id trans ref field turned off photo mechanic is clever enough to allow you to turn fields on and off in a template and if you're using the template editor where that feature is available it turns the fields on and off for you as you have selected if you're using the other editor where every field is on all the time well it just is so we'll double check here trust but verify and sure enough we have the trans ref field turned off so when i apply this nothing will be applied in the trans ref field so i'll go ahead and apply it and we'll see what happened and we'll go back to the first one here and this is the underscore camera file name underscore selects dot jpeg version the edited jpeg and this file name with select added to it is just how i have the exporter in my non-destructive raw editor and i use on1 raw for this sort of thing that's just how i have the exporter programmed if we slide down here just a little ways and we look at our trans ref field here is the correct file name in this picture we skipped over that we originally wrote that file name when we imported or ingested the picture into photo mechanic at the beginning and there it is it's still there so we'll pop over to the other picture in the pair and we'll look at its trans ref and here is its correct original file name so there we go we've used the template editor to caption photos working around metadata that was already existing in a field in those photos if i was in this situation working with real pictures i could have worked my way through the pictures captioning as i went along using the template editor so let's go back and we'll open up the template editor one last time before we leave it and go back to some fancy features in the other editor and let's look at a couple of features that i didn't mention before that you should probably know about take a look here at the description writers field and the keywords field and we'll look at our little tick boxes beside these fields and we can see that we have a second tick box that's beside a plus sign what the second tick box here does is it turns on append mode so if i wrote a keyword here i could append it to existing keywords using this feature that's really handy there's a lot of times when you keyword pictures in a take and then so you'll see some pictures where you want to add another keyword the keywords already existing on these pictures might not all be the same so you don't want to take a whole batch of keywords and write them all over the existing ones so here we go we can use append with by turning on this little tick box here and we can add keywords to existing keywords you'll notice that these two fields are the only ones that have this feature the caption field has the feature too but it's fancier in the caption field we can prefix as well as append keywords are perfectly logical very useful we can use them just the way i said why the heck is this tick box also available on description writer it doesn't matter to 99 of us this is a feature that is aimed directly at wire service editors wire services being a core market for photo mechanic and when a wire service editor works on a photo works on the caption they might translate it they might make an addition or a correction or something like that the original caption writer is still the original caption writer and that's the person who would be responsible presumably for identification of people that sort of thing and the editor indeed did work on the picture both of them have to be accountable and so this is kind of like a chain of evidence or a checkout sheet on a clipboard everybody adds their initials as they touch the caption and they go along so there it is that's why that feature is there and as i said most of us really just don't care we'll go ahead and dismiss that editor remember how i said you could call the regular metadata editor from either the contact sheet thumbnails in photo mechanic or from the preview so here where we go i just use the i key i called the metadata editor from this preview image if on the other hand i want to call the template editor and i hit command i nothing happens well that's kind of a drag because we just saw a moment ago how we can use the template editor to caption pictures and it would be really nice to have a halfway decent preview when we did that now i suppose i could move the preview out of the way and i could call the template editor from there that might work but that's really pretty awkward there's a workaround that's probably available to most of us if not all of us if we have multiple monitors and that's simply to put the preview and the contact sheet on two different monitors and in that case if you have a picture up in the preview window you can call the template editor by simply calling it from the contact sheet in the other monitor unfortunately i can't show you that because my video capture software only records one monitor at a time so now let's go back to the are we calling it the regular iptc editor yeah so let's go back to that editor and we'll look at some advanced functionality that we can use in that editor that's actually pretty cool so we'll open it up here remember i said that the template editor couldn't read existing metadata well it can't on its own but we can do it from here we can send this metadata from this editor to that one now something that i like very much about photo mechanic is that you do not have to know secret handshake mysterious keyboard commands to do your job and to be productive there's lots of keyboard commands in photo mechanic and they're really good they make you more productive they're efficient all that good stuff but virtually every single one of them exists either in the main menu pull downs or in buttons or something this dialog actually both of these dialogs is about the only place in photo mechanic where there are keystrokes that aren't obvious that you can use to do cool stuff if i hold down the option key on this macintosh it would be the alt key on a pc you'll notice that several of my buttons change and this button which would normally actually apply whatever is in my template editor to this image changes to copy to template well okay we'll just press the button cancel that editor we'll reopen the template editor and holy smokes all of the metadata from that particular photo has now been loaded into our template editor and as you can see the metadata in this picture is pretty extensive and this picture is actually made for a wire service so this metadata was done pretty carefully and if i want to move on to another picture in this same shoot i really don't want to type all this stuff over again and i don't want to copy and paste it field by field so i can take the metadata from my first picture i can load it in here and now i can do anything with it that i can do in the template editor and you'll notice one thing that i do have to do is since it copied the actual file name in this transref field i have to make sure that's turned off before i move on but that is a great feature in the regular iptc info editor that allows us to use it to read metadata with the template editor close the template editor and we'll go back to the regular metadata editor once again take a look at these navigation buttons in the right rail we've already used the save and advanced button and we've used the straight forward and backwards navigation buttons we use the copy button and the paste button those are pretty self-evident here we have save upload and move along what in the world does that do and i'll tell you frankly i used photo mechanic for a long time and i didn't discover this button until just recently and i'm sort of kicking myself because this is a really cool button what this does is this allows you as you're working on your captions to go ahead and upload your pictures you press this button and boom the picture goes to the active page in the uploader and is sent to wherever is targeted in that active uploader and photomechanic has uploaders for about a dozen and a half different protocols and services they've got three flavors of ftp if you're working for a client that ftps they have most of the big file sharing services like box and dropbox and amazon fs3 they have a bunch of photo sharing or portfolio website services like photoshelter and flickr and smugmug and zenfolio there are a bunch of options for turning in your picture but you have to set the uploader you have to set the target in the uploader so if we go back to our alt or option key press it this button turns into an options button and it opens the uploader and i can go ahead and choose my target and then i can just close my uploader and now i can use this button to instantly upload pictures as i go as i work through them captioning we have a start and stop button for voice notes there's not very many cameras that use voice notes now only really top of the line cameras but if you have one that does you can use voice notes in this particular dialog you can set ratings and color labels from here and this is pretty cool you have this thumbnail in the corner that you can use to help you with ids or whatnot but it's really kind of too small you really have a hard time telling who's who if you simply click and hold on it the preview expands into this one which is a pretty good size preview it's big enough to let you see who's who and write a proper caption in your picture and by the way i'm recording this as in florida we're about to enter what i guess would be our second coronavirus lockdown and i didn't mention it but the protest that's going on in this picture these are bartenders and they were protesting to try to make the county reopen the bars from the original lockdown they did this on the first day that coronavirus cases truly exploded after the what we now understand to be premature reopening that we tried to do down here so these people's sense of timing is just absolutely not that good but there we have it this is how we can use the two different photo editors in photo mechanic as always if you have questions if you have comments whatever reach out in the comments or on social media or on the contact form on my blog until next time mind your metadata and for goodness sakes folks be safe out there