What is Image Metadata in Photography?

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An Inclusive Approach to Metadata in Photography

In photography, often we talk about image details or management. But have you ever thought that what exactly is this? It is referred to as image metadata that helps in sorting and organizing images. In this article, I will enlighten you on What is Image Metadata in Photography.

However, metadata is a piece of important information about the image such as lens, focal depth, aperture, ISO, DPI, shutter speed, image creator, captions, titles, comments, keywords, licensing rights, contact information, and much more. Adding metadata to an image is an easy chore as you just need photo management software i.e. Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom.

General Definition of Meta Data

Metadata carries pertinent details of an image and information about the production part as well. You must have noticed that a picture gets saved with some information after being clicked, that information is metadata. This metadata is automatically created whereas if you want to add additional metadata, manual operation is needed.

Simply put, metadata explains what an image is all about. For example, for this article, the author, date written, file size, etc. are considered metadata. The sole purpose of metadata is to make information available to users in an easy and quick way. Knowing a little bit of detail makes it easy for the user to search for an image swiftly.

How To Add Metadata?

Two approaches are there to create metadata i.e. automatically and manually. Although most of the information is generated automatically, extra sort of info can be added with photo editing software. Entering metadata in an image equips you to be more thorough because you can input anything as long as it is relevant. Dig deep into the categories of image metadata:

Technical Metadata: Such information is automatically embedded into the image and usually contains details like ISO, aperture, DPI, shutter speed, date/time, camera model and brand, etc. Also, the GPS location of the image gets also captured in the metadata.
Descriptive Metadata: Manual addition of information in the image by someone is referred to as descriptive metadata. Though this information makes images easily searchable, it holds major significance in photography. Image creators, titles, captions, comments, etc. are some examples of effective descriptive metadata.
Administrative Metadata: Licensing rights, contact info of the image owner or photographer, copyright information, copyright website URL and restrictions, etc. are administrative metadata.

Metadata in Photography

In photography, metadata is the information that is related to image files and not random files. As with all sorts of metadata, some of the information is created by the camera itself. However, some information is embedded manually by the owner of the image, and copyright and licensing rights are that sorts of data.

How Metadata is Helpful?

To differentiate the images, metadata helps. To search for an image from a pool of thousands of images, a little information can sort the results. If the location of the image is known, you can simply find it. Without metadata, finding images is a tiring endeavor. Info like date, image content, size or copyright, etc. can narrow down the search results effectively. Also, it is helpful in protecting the image by inputting copyright information. Photographers expand a pretty good amount of time for metadata entries to make the search process easy in the future.

Edit / Add Additional Metadata Info

Use Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom to edit the metadata entries. Mention whatever you feel like such as location, genre, people, event, season, or anything that holds some meaning. To do so, you might follow the steps below in Adobe Photoshop.