Stephen Honda

Orange County Photographers Should Use Metadata Tags to Organize Images

OC Wedding Photographers have many moving parts in their work. To aid in staying organized, a they should track their images by using metadata tags.

A photographer can increase profits and the enjoyment of his work by organizing his work. The following article recommends that a photographer apply metadata tags to his images in order to maintain their organization.

There are a number of photography related software programs that allow a user to tag a particular image with a particular term. Modern search technology can then quickly find these images across a hard drive or across a network.

For example, let us say a photographer wants to create a portfolio of images that represent his best work. He could make a copy of the picture and then move the copy in a folder called portfolio. However this method has major limitations. First, there is a duplicate image. Anytime a duplicate image needs to be made it takes up original hard drive space and backup drives. In addition there is an added complexity to the system because now there are two files that need to be managed instead of just one.

In contrast, by adding a tag called portfolio a duplicate images is not needed. Only the original file will need to be backed up, not a copy. In addition adding a tag to the metadata has the added ability of searching on multiple tags. For example to set apart a few of his best pictures from every newborn shoot, a photographer might add the tags date, portfolio, and newborn to the image. Later, when the photographer is updating the newborn section of his website, he can find the relevant images by searching for images that were created before a particular date and have the newborn and portfolio tags attached.

There is great flexibility in this method. Almost any search software, such as Google Desktop or Microsoft Windows internal search ability will recognize these tags. Unlike the folder system of organizing images where the entire folder must reside on a single hard drive, the tags system will serve its purpose even if the pictures are spanned across numerous computers and backup devices.

Searching for folders and managing files is not why most photographers entered the business. Most entered so they would be able to express their creativity. Organizing images using metadata will decrease the time a photographer spends doing mundane but necessary organizational tasks and increase the time available for creative work.

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