Using metadata to sort and find images in a catalogue

- As digital photographers, we're all accustomed to our images coming into our computers with metadata. That's the date and time, exposure information and all sorts of other stuff that you're camera automatically records into an image. Now, you may have sitting deep in the back of a closet somewhere, a box full of a bunch of old photos, analog photos, which you may never have thought of is the value of adding metadata to those images. Sitting here with my friend Jim Hyde who has thought about that. Jim, you thought about that to a fairly obsessive compulsive degree here.

- Thank you, I think so. - And the result is actually really interesting. What have you got here? - Well, I've been working on this personal project that involves scanning literally thousands of items from my family archives. My dad was into radio and musical theater in the 20s and 30s and then later we had a recording studio, so I have all of these photos from his professional career. And, he was also an avid amateur photographer, so I have all his family photos. And I've been gradually scanning them, and bringing them into Lightroom and adding keywords that make the photos work harder, as in allowing me to find them, examine the library from different angles, and even just kind of establish narratives based on what is turning up.

- So the process you're engaging here is the same one that you would do with a digital photo. Your work flow is rather than, putting in a card and reading images, you're scanning images, and when you're getting them in here, you're starting to have metadata. - Right. - We're all used to that idea. What are you getting here that people may not have thought of? - Well, what I wanted to do, the first thing you kind of have to do is, develop a taxonomy, a filing system for how you might want to categorize the photos based on how you might want to look at them. So, I've created keywords that allow me to explore by decades, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, by who's in them.

My mom, my dad, various family members, by whether or not they were, they dealt with my dad's career or whether they were personal items. I have a keyword called "not a photo" that lets me home in on theatrical play bills or newspaper clippings that his name might've been mentioned in. So, that's kind of step one, how might I want to look at these later and how might I want to categorize them. From there, it's just the matter of I scan them dozen or so at a time. When I've got some spare time I bring them into Lightroom and Lightroom makes it very easy to keyword them.

What that gives you is, at a very superficial level, the ability to search for the photos using the Light Refine command, Command Control F. I can say, you know, radio, and here are all the photos that in one way or another deal with my dad's career in radio. Where things get even more interesting though is when you create smart collections in Lightroom. And, a smart collection is basically an album with Search attached to it. And I've created a bunch of different smart collections for 20s, not show business.

This is all the all family photos from the 1920s. 20s show business, obviously. from the showbiz angle. I've created some that let me look at geography, you know, I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, here's 1940s Pittsburgh. And, if you go into these, they're really very simple, it's just a set of criteria that you're asking Lightroom to match and I've got keyword contains 40s, keyword contains Pittsburgh. If I wanted to make this more granular and just find photos of my dad, from Pittsburgh in the 1940s, I would say keywords contains dad and bam, Lightroom narrows it down that quickly.

- How many images are we talking about so far total that you've got in here? - I've scanned upwards of 2000, the version that's in my, on this laptop has only about 1200, 1197 in them. - It just sifted those very quickly to that set of three keywords. - And that's where metadata really starts paying off, because to just scroll through these is like looking through the original bankers box is that they're all stored in and once they're categorized in this way, then it allows me to look at exactly the kind of photo that I'm looking for at the time.

- Now working with keywords in Lightroom is actually pretty simple. You've got what appears to be a fairly complex detailed taxonomy, but you don't actually have to have all that in your head because Lightroom auto completes keywords, as you're-- - Right. - Typing and make it very easy to ensure consistency of your keywords as you go. - Yeah, yeah. If I start typing PI it auto completes it to Pittsburgh-- - [Host] Okay. - [Jim] For example. - Now one of the things you can do with Lightroom once you've got an album made is, share it. And that buys you some additional functionality. - Yeah, with Lightroom, you can share through the creative cloud.

You can share collections that you've created or smart collections and I've done that, and that gives you a couple of benefits. For one thing, it lets you look at the photos on other devices. I can look at these photos while I'm on my phone while I'm waiting for a plane if I want to. - [Host] Right. - I can look at them on the Apple TV in my living room 'cause there's a Lightroom app for the Apple TV. But I can also share them with family members and you can enable the photos for downloading or not. So if a family member wants to download and have a print made, they can do that. And there's also a Comments box, when you share them through the web interface. And I've done that to enable family members to kind of help me out in categorizing them 'cause there are people in here that I don't always recognize.

- [Host] Right. - And I have a key word called Unknown and so I can, I can publish an album of those unknown photos. And I can kind of crowd source the, the tagging to my family who can say, "Oh, that's Uncle Frank in that one." And I can go back and add that. - That's great. This is, I suddenly am thinking this is about much more than, this something you do with much more than just a box of family photos. - Oh yeah. This is a personal project but there are businesses and organizations of all kinds that have banker's boxes filled with analog things that aren't getting any younger and that are trapped in the analog domain.

They can't be shared online. They can't be put on a website. They can't be used in a video or a photo book. - Jim, this is very cool. I don't, I don't know if you can really see it here. When Jim sat me down and first started showing me this, I was really struck by the addition of metadata takes this random agglomeration of photos you have spread around and simply just looking through these smart albums, just by key wording them and letting them sift and filter into place, you kind of immediately get a narrative then. - Yeah. - That normally you'd have to work really hard to piece together.

- If I wanted to put together a slideshow of all my dad's theatrical reviews, I could do a search for the keyword called Clipping. And bam, there they all are. - Yeah, they all are. Yeah. So it's really becomes, your metadata is giving you this kind of meta document out of all these photos. It's a, a sortable, siftable way to, it's a living, breathing kind of entity here. Yeah, it was very inspiring to see. If you've got a bunch of old photos laying around that you've been meaning to scan simply for the sake of preservation. Think about what's going on here. The possibilities with metadata, 'cause that may just give you the motivation that you need to get going, because it does turn a box of old photos into something far more interesting.

- Big time. - Thanks a lot Jim, this is really cool. - My pleasure.