If you’re a photographer (or other content creator), one of your big concerns should be attaching your information to your photos. It’s pretty easy these days to pass photos around and for your photos to wind up in places you didn’t expect with no identifying info on them.

Luckily there’s a nifty tool in Photoshop to help you out with this. It’s called File Info. (under the File menu) The cool thing about this is that you can save your info as a template, which makes it easy to reapply the data to a large number of photos.

The way I use it is to enter in all my basic info and save that as a template. This can be applied to all my photos. If I want to add more detailed info, like a description and keywords, I can do so. However, usually I’m only going to do that if I’m selling the image as stock or making the photos easily searchable for a client. If I’m just posting them to Flickr, then it’s probably unnecessary to do that for every image.

In addition to putting your info in the Description area, it’s important to enter it into the IPTC area as well. IPTC is a consortium of major publishers that are trying to come up with standards for tracking copyrighted content (among other things).

Ultimately, it’s always possible for someone to intentionally remove metadata. There will always be thieves and unscrupulous individuals. These protections are aimed at preventing accidental removal of identifying info, which is the more usual scenario and extremely important.

cheers,

Jim