There are a variety of options for storing metadata relating to your images within Lightroom. Depending on your particular setup, you may be storing metadata within the Lightroom database, or alternatively it may be written out to .xmp sidecar files. However, I prefer to embed my metadata directly into my photos (before importing them into Lightroom), whether they're JPGs or RAW files. That's right, contrary to popular belief you can alter RAW files to include meta information within the file itself rather than an accompanying XMP file. I accomplish this using ExifTool, a program written by Phil Harvey (available for Mac and Windows). Whilst a full explanation of how to use the program is beyond the scope of this article, it's relatively simple to add an EXIF description to an image, for example:

$ exiftool -EXIF:ImageDescription="My new description" myfile.jpg

ExifTool can deal with EXIF, IPTC, XMP and many other types of metadata, which leads to a problem – how do we know which fields are the ones that show up in Lightroom when we import photos? So far I've not been able to find any resources which tell you this, so I thought I'd compile one myself.

The resulting table can be downloaded here.

Where more than one option is given, the first one listed will 'override' all others, i.e. if both fields contain information then the one listed first will be displayed in Lightroom.

Finally, I should probably also add that there are plenty of people who would advocate *never* changing the metadata stored within your images. I have heard it argued that if you change the metadata in an image, you have no way of proving that, for example, the Author data is that which was originally embedded by your camera – it could be that you added your name to the metadata of someone else's image. You therefore lose any reinforcing evidence that that particular image was taken by you.Personally, I like knowing that I can move all my images around without making sure I include .xmp files with them. I also like the security that comes with knowing that my cataloguing information is safely stored within my images; if my Lightroom database ever corrupts or I ever need to use another piece of DAM software (heaven forbid!), it should be easy to catalogue them because the information is stored within the images. However, this is your decision – bear in mind that it is possible to see when metadata has been changed in an image, and that the techniques discussed here may not be suitable for everyone or all situations.

Tags: Adobe, exif, exiftool, iptc, Lightroom, Metadata, phil harvey, Photoshop, Script, xmp