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Click a button, display a Description field for the photo, type in text and you’re done.ĭavid Riecks said that the idea is not new. The encouraging news is that it shouldn’t take much technologically to simplify the process, to maybe have a button on the camera that says, “Add Description.” Or a smart-phone app that has the same function.

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So it’s not realistic to expect people to struggle with photo-editing software and the tedium of adding descriptions to each photo. It’s common for people to leave photos on their smart phones or SD cards and forget about them until they accumulate hundreds of photos. Or we would put that chore at the end of our long list of chores. Given the choice, most of us would not bother.

The problem is requiring people to use photo-editing software at all to add descriptions. The larger problem is not so much with the photo-editing software. Ultimately you want to embed the description so that it always remains stored in the photo file, no matter where the photo goes or what you view the photo on or with. Which fields should you use? Is “caption” the same as “description”? Which fields equate to writing on the back of a paper photo?Īnd to further complicate the process, depending on the software, a description added to a photo might not actually get embedded into the photo file it might be visible only with the specific software you used to embed the description. To complicate matters though, the field names and terminology vary widely from program to program. The result is that whatever text you entered gets stored within the photo file itself. The steps are usually a variation on this: starting the software, opening the photo, selecting the menu options File > Get Info and typing text into fields. As the saying goes, “The obvious is already known.” However, the process is challenging for a newcomer. To them, the process is simple, mainly because they do it routinely. Photography professionals routinely use photo-editing software to add photometadata to their digital photos for copyright and business reasons. In fact, it’s much more difficult than it should be. And there is a simple question people ask us to which we don’t have a simple answer: “How?”. But honestly, writing on the back of a paper photo is a breeze by comparison. And that part is tricky.Īdding a description to a digital photo (also known as photometadata) is analogous to writing on the back of a paper photo. So, aside from encouraging people to back up their digital photos, we also encourage them to add descriptions to the digital photos. We’ve made an informational video about photometadata, written about our project with the Stock Artists Alliance, and, as part of that project, interviewed photometadata evangelist David Riecks. We explain photometadata and show EXIF examples. We talk about file formats, such as JPEGs and TIFFs, and the effects of compression.

But, as information professionals, we’re also eager to explain the complexities of digital photos. Our main concern is for everyone to back up and care for their digital photos. By far, most of the questions we get asked are about digital photos and we are able to answer almost every question. We also try to pay attention to questions from the general public, with whom we interact at events such as the National Book Festival, Personal Archiving Day at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s Saving Our African American Treasures. My Signal colleagues and I give out digital-preservation advice based on our research, our experiences and our understanding of best practices.