Adding copyright and metadata information

In this exercise, I'm going to show you how to load your illustration with metadata that includes information about you. Who's the author? That'd be you. What's your contact info? Is the illustration copyrighted? What's your URL that is your Web address, and so on. And then you can save that info off as a template so you can apply it over and over again. So I have opened Four-page floral 6 in.ai found inside the 03_open folder, and I've already assigned metadata to this document.

To get to it, you go up to the File menu and you choose the File Info command where you press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+I, Command+Shift+Option+I on the Mac. And this is actually a keyboard shortcut that I lobbied for. So it's mash your fist on the modifier keys, press the I key for Info. The reason is I find this to be one of the most important commands for working creative professionals across the Adobe Creative Suite applications. So go ahead and choose this command, and you will find out that the author of this illustration is a fellow named Tolchik associated with the Fotolia image library, and you can learn more about that library at fotolia.com/deke.

You can even get a special deal if you so desire, and you can go right there by clicking on the Go To URL button. That will automatically open this link inside of your default Web browser. And one of the reasons I mention this is because you can do the same thing with your illustrations. You can enter a URL for your Web site. Now, if you want to do this, go to the Description tab, the very first tab here inside of this File Info dialog box, Document Title will contain the file name by default. But you'll have to fill out the other info.

For example, definitely fill out the Author name; you, of course. And then you might want to go ahead and set up a Copyright Status. Notice that you can say Unknown if you want to which seems pointless; that's the default or you want to copyright your document or if you're feeling magnanimous, you can set it to Public Domain. If you're going to enter a Copyright Notice which I suggest you do, then here's how to do it. The trick is entering that copyright character right there. So I'm going to go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key and knock that down the line, and here's what you do.

On the Mac, you press Option+G as in guard, because a copyright is a way to guard your illustration. On the PC, you have to press and hold the Alt key and then dial-in the character address for the Copyright symbol on your keyboard's numerical keypad. And here's how it works. Press and hold Alt if you're working on a PC, go to your numerical keypad and dial-in these numbers sequentially. 0, 1, 6, 9 and then release the Alt key. So once again, you press and hold the Alt key, you dial in sequentially on the numerical keypad.

That's the only way this works; 0, 1, 6, 9 and then you release the Alt key and then you have a Copyright character. All right, we don't need two in a row. So I'll delete one. After that you would enter the current year which in my case is 2010 but for you, it might be you know 2139 or something like that and then your name or company and so on. All right, so let's say you've entered this basic info and I don't actually need this new information I've entered. Oh! And by the way, if you want to enter your contact info, you go up to the IPTC tab, go ahead and switch to it and then enter your Address info, your Phone number, your E-mails etcetera.

All right, I'm going to switch back to Description. Now, let's say you want to go ahead and save out this info as a template so you don't have to fill out these individual fields over and over again. Well, first, make sure that Keywords and Description are blank because those would be document-specific entries. So you'd just want to keep everything as general as possible. So this would be the info for your illustrations across the board. Don't worry about Document Title. That goes ahead and references the file name by default. Then drop down here.

Click this down-pointing arrowhead. Notice I've already created a template for Tolchik, but what you would do is you would choose Export. As little sense is that makes that you're exporting a template here. Go ahead and choose the command. It seems to me we're just saving one. And then go ahead and enter My metadata template or possibly something a little more descriptive than that. Then you want to end it with the extension, XMP, although theoretically, that'll be added by default. Then click on Save and then after that point, you can bring up all of these entries once again by clicking on this down-pointing arrowhead and then choosing My metadata template from the list.

And you'll be asked whether you want to clear the existing properties and replace with template properties. Most likely that's what you want to do is select that very first option and then click OK in order to load the File Info dialog box with your metadata info. Notice now that My metadata template changes to a button. So all you have to do is click on it in order to load that data. All right, I'll cancel that and I'll actually cancel out of the dialog-box because I've already filled things out in advance. And that's how you go about adding metadata to a document in Illustrator.

The final step would be to go to the File menu and choose the Save command or press Ctrl+S, Command+S on the Mac, in order to update that file on disk.