John Shaw Nature & Digital Photography Workshops Click here for locations and dates
				Mexico's Colonial Heartland March 17–24, 2007
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				Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya September 7–21, 2007
				Australia Wildlife November 1–20, 2007

I recently wrote about creating Photoshop actions and showed you how to make one to add copyright information to your images. Actions are great time savers, especially when dealing with a complicated series of steps that you must perform over and over. But if all you want to do is add your copyright and contact information to your digital images, then using a metadata template is even easier.

I’m assuming you’re using Photoshop CS or CS2. Still working with version 5.5? Hey, it’s long past time when you should have upgraded. While I liked CS, CS2 is even better. Just in passing I’ll mention that Bridge, which replaced the File Browser from CS, keeps getting better with each new update Adobe releases. If you haven’t tried it recently, get the latest download (don’t use the Bridge update feature, go directly to the Adobe website, www.adobe.com, and download).

OK, let’s create a metadata template. Open Photoshop or Bridge. Open any image whatsoever in Photoshop, or select an image in Bridge. This can even be one of the sample pictures that are already in the My Pictures folder found on every copy of Windows. Makes no difference what the image is, just open or select one.

Now select File > File Info and this dialogue box appears:

You’ll want to fill in some information on two different pages, the Description page and the IPTC Contact page. Add as much or as little information as you wish. To get the copyright symbol © on a Windows machine, hold the Alt key down and type 0169 on the numeric keyboard (not the number keys). On a Mac it’s Option-G.

Now click on the little right-facing arrow in the upper-right corner. This flyout menu appears:

Click on Save Metadata Template, and you can name your template. I’ll call it "Copyright info."

Hit Save and you’re done creating the template.

Now here’s how to use this template. Open Bridge and select all the images to which you want to add the information. The easy method is to open a folder, then select Edit > Select All or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-A or Command-A. Now click on Tools.

You can Append Metadata to add the new information to whatever you might have typed in those fields previously, or Replace Metadata to show only the new copyright info.

If for any reason you want to change the information in the template, make a new one and save over the old one. If you want to totally delete the template open File Info, click on the upper-right corner arrow, and select Delete Metadata Template.

Once you’ve set up a template it takes just a few keystrokes to add your contact information to all your images. Now if there were only a template to make editors use all these images!

Announcement: John's newest book, John Shaw's Photoshop Field Guide, is now available. This is an eBook on CD, with step-by-step instructions on making prints using Photoshop and Epson printers. It is available only from John's website: www.johnshawphoto.com