From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

892 Streamlining a multi-use metadata template

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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892 Streamlining a multi-use metadata template

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- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to hand edit a metadata template, so that it contains just the information that you need to assign to future files, whether they're photographic images, pieces of vector drawn artwork, or entire designs that you create for example inside InDesign. All right so here I am inside Adobe Bridge and notice that I have three different XMP files right here, if you can't see them, then you want to go up to the view menu and choose show hidden files. That will allow you to see those XMP files. All right so we've got this file right here, which I created using the create metadata template command under the tools menu, which is going to be a very lean file. We also have this guy which I created using the file info command under the file menu, which is available not only here inside Bridge but inside Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign as well. For me it's dimmed because you can't assign file info to an XMP file. All right but I want to show you what they look like. I've set these files up so that they're going to open inside Notepad here on the PC. So I'll just double click on this guy. Notice this is a file I created using the create metadata template command and as you can see there's very little information inside this file. So we're seeing the author info right here, we're also seeing the copyright info and this little property right here marks the file as being copyrighted. So marking it true gives it a copyright symbol when you open it up inside Photoshop for example. All right compare that to the metadata file, that the file info command created, which is ginormous, you can see that it just goes on and on and it has all these camera raw settings inside of it and a bunch of other junk that we don't want to communicate to other files. More dangerous however is the sheer number of creation dates so notice I'll go to the edit menu here inside Notepad and I'll choose the find command and I'll set find what to date, so I'm just searching for the word date. And so notice the first one is the modification date, then the second guy is the creation date, the XMP creation date incidentally. And then the third item right here is the metadata date, that is the last time the metadata was updated for this particular file. It's the creation date however that's going to mess us up. Now I'll click find next again here until I find this guy the Photoshop date created, so an entirely different creation date command. And this is the so called IPTC property by the way. So named after the international press telecommunications counsel. All right but if I keep searching, I'm going to find yet another one, this is the EXIF data which is the date that's recorded by the digital camera when you capture the file. We don't want any of this stuff to be in here. All right so I'm just going to cancel that and close this file. Now the one thing that this much cleaner file is missing is the URL, so we don't have the website information inside this file. If you want that information which I think you do, then you'll want to hand edit this file right here, in order to get this more streamlined metadata template. And so notice it includes me as the author, it includes all the copyright status as marked as true and I've got this additional property that includes my website Deke.com. Happily notice if I click at the beginning of the file and choose the find command from the edit menu here inside Notepad and I search for the word date, click the find button and it cannot find any date properties because there are none. All right so, I'll just go ahead and cancel out of everything here, let me show you how it works. So I'll go ahead and select this Harbor seal.dng file which as you may recall, contains the author and copyright information as well as the URL. And to see what that looks like, I'll go up to the file menu and choose the file info command. And we can see there's the author right there at the top. There's the copyright notice, there's the copyright status which is set to copyrighted, so that's that item that read marked true and then we've also got the URL. So what you would do then, is just go ahead and export that file and save it off as an XMP file. But you can also edit that file if you want to. Which works a little differently on a PC than it does on a Mac. So here I am on a PC, I'll go ahead and select that guy Harbor seal, which I created in the previous movie, it's the item that contains all that metadata. I'll go ahead and right click on it. So again, this does not work this way on the Mac. I'll show you how it works in just a moment. But if you're working on a PC, then you would choose open with and you would specify which application you want to open the file, in my case Notepad, then I'll click OK and I can see all of this data. So it's all the stuff that we saw in that file info document. All right so I'm going to scroll down to the bottom here and I'm just going to select this junk right here and get rid of it. So we don't need anything after slash XMP metadata and then that closing angle bracket right there. All right now I'm going to scroll all the way back up to the top and I want you to notice this item DC creator right here, DC does not stand for DC Comics, it stands for Dublin Core, named after Dublin Ohio by the way, which was the first of the metadata standards. All right so you want to leave that stuff in there, but you do not need this stuff right here. So we want to get rid of all the date stuff. Modify date, create date and metadata date. And so go ahead and select that stuff and delete it. And then notice we've got this DC rights item right here, which is a copyright notice, you'll want to leave that in. So just click here in front of the opening angle bracket AUX serial number. Just click over on the far left side and then scroll down to the bottom of this document and notice this item XMP rights marked true, we want that and XMP rights web statement and then your URL. We want both of those lines, so shift click right at this location, in order to select everything above it and then delete it. So I just press the backspace key here on the PC and then just confirm that you still have your creator right here, you still have your rights property and we have these two XMP rights properties marked true and the web statement at which point, go to the file menu and choose the save command in order to overwrite that file. And then you can just close out and I'm going to cancel out of these two dialog boxes here. So I can quickly bring those of you who are working on the Mac up to speed. Notice this guy right here, Mac directions.txt. This'll show you where the XMP file is on your system so you can get to it and edit it inside of a text editor such as text edit. All right so I'll go and double click on this file and you can see very brief little directions here. You go to the Macintosh finder and then you choose go to folder, the go to folder command from the go menu and then you enter this string and it needs to be exactly like this by the way. So Tilda slash library slash application, but don't edit all that stuff, just select that line inside my file, copy it and then paste it into the go to folder field and click the go button and you will see your XMP file, at which point once again, you can edit it inside of a text editor. All right I'll go ahead and close that guy and now let's see how well this works. I'll double click on the Antarctica 2020 folder here in order to gain access to these eight images. All DNG files but they don't have to be. They can be any form of image file, or a piece of vector based artwork that you created inside illustrator or a design you created inside InDesign and so forth. I'll just press control A or command A on the Mac to select all of those guys. And then you can go to the tools menu, once again here inside Bridge. Choose append metadata and then choose Harbor seal, which is the name of the file that I'm demonstrating with here. Or you can use the file info command. In which case you'd go to the file menu and choose file info and the benefit of working this way, is that you can see what you're doing a little better and this command file info unlike the other commands here inside bridge is available inside Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign as well. So I'll go ahead and choose that command and then you can see we don't have any author info or copyright notice or anything. Then I'll drop down to this template folder item right here and I'll choose Harbor seal. Then I'll make sure that this final option is selected, keep original metadata but append matching properties from template and I'll click OK and you can see we have the author info, we've got the copyright status set to copyrighted, we have the notice and we have that URL. At which point notice that the creation date is set to multiple values, that's okay so click OK and now you can select any one of these files independently of the other ones and then return to the file menu and choose the file info command and notice that the creation date is still February 10th of 2020 which is the accurate information, it did not get messed up the way that we saw in the previous movie. All right I'll go and cancel out, just wanted to confirm the date there. And I want to show you one more thing. If somebody gets your file on a PC, then they can see that copyright info. So here we are looking at the contents of that same folder that contains the Harbor seal document right here and if I right click on it and choose the properties command or you can press ALT enter if you prefer. Then notice if I switch over to the details panel, I can see the author and I can see the copyright info. And so can anybody else who ends up getting hold of your file. And that is how you create a lean, mean, streamlined metadata template file, using nothing more than an everyday average text editor.

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