Metadata Marketing: Stepping Up Your Marketing For Free

Getting your name out there can be hard, especially when you are just starting your journey as a photographer. In this post I am going to show you how you can step your marketing game up by using a photo's metadata to market yourself  and your photos on social media.


So what the hell is metadata?
Metadata is basically data that describes other data. This descriptive data is hidden within a file and can be accessed when you go into the properties of the image file. In terms of photography, this usually means information on specific camera settings such as the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO you shot the photo at. However, we can use editing software to edit this metadata to include important information such as your name, your phone number, your website, and whatever else you think should be included to make you easier to contact by perspective clients.

Let's say you just did a photo shoot for a senior in high school and you sent your digital files to the parents. The first thing they are going to do is set up an album on Facebook for everyone to see their son or daughter. Think of how many times your photos will be seen by their network aka your potential clients.

Most photographers rely on watermarks to market their name and hope that those people viewing their work will visit their website, but let's be honest, people are lazy. If you're just starting out, there's a very small chance that someone is going to see your little logo in the corner of a photo and spend the time looking up your business. What we must do is make it extremely easy for people to contact you or visit your website.

This is where metadata comes in. We can edit the metadata of a photo to automatically post your name and your website when a client uploads your photos in an album on social media. Now even the laziest of people will have no excuse to not check out your work because a link to your website will be right in front of their frickin' face. All they have to do is click it.

In this post I'm going to be showing you how to edit a photo's metadata in Adobe Lightroom since that's my editing software choice, but I'm sure there are tons of tutorials out there on the internet that will show you how to accomplish the same goal in different software platforms.

Ok. Now that that's all out of the way, lets get to the good stuff.

First, you will need to open Lightroom and import your images that you want to add metadata information to. Now, assuming you have already touched up your photos in the develop module, go back to the library module in the top right and lets setup a metadata preset. To set up a metadata preset, click on the drop-down arrow in the metadata tab on the right side of the screen.

Next you should get a bunch of information like in the screenshot below:

Click on the preset bar and then click "edit presets."

You will now get a window that looks like the one below with all of the possible metadata information that you can enter.

What you will need to do is fill out the "Basic Info" information and the "IPTC Creator" information like I did in the screenshot below. The "Caption" can be anything and is what will show up automatically when a client uploads your photos to an album on social media. I put who the photo was by and a link to my bog, but you can put whatever you like. I also entered the creator information in the "IPTC Creator" drop-down menu that will become embedded in the photo and can be accessed when the client right-clicks on the image and views the "properties" menu in Windows/Mac.

Once you're done filling out this information, go ahead and click "done." You should now be prompted to save this preset, so click "save as."

After you click "save as," name your preset whatever you'd like.

That's it for creating the preset; you should now see the preset when you click the "preset" section in the metadata drop-down menu on the right side of the screen. Now go ahead and select all of the images you want to export in the library menu. Once you've selected your images, click the preset menu and select the name of the preset you just created.

As you can see on the right side of the screen, all of the metadata we entered shows up under the metadata section.

Once you've selected your photos and applied the metadata preset to all of them, it is now time to export your final images. Since you already have all of your images selected, all you need to do is right-click on one of them and choose "export." You should then be shown the export menu.

In the export menu you are able to choose where you want to save your images and if you want to resize them or not, but what we are interested in is the metadata section, so scroll down through the export menu until you see it. Once you find it, make sure that "all metadata" is included and that both of the boxes below that drop-down menu are not selected. Now click "export."

That's it. You're done. Your photos should've been saved in the location that you specified in the export menu and should include all of the metadata that we wanted to add to each photo. To test this, I found the photo on my computer and right-clicked on it to view the properties of the image. And would you look at that; it's all there! We can see everything we included and it'll be so much easier for a potential client to contact us for work in the future.

Also, just to show you that the caption text that we edited in our preset is automatically added when someone uploads our photos to an album on social media, I decided to upload the image we exported into an album on Facebook. Guess what? THAT ALSO SHOWED UP. Now every time this photo is uploaded to an album it will include who the photo was by as well as a link to the photographer's website in the photo's description on Facebook. And yeah, the person could easily delete all that stuff, but most of the time they're nice people and would be glad to give the photographer credit. If not, give them as many images as you can and laugh as they try to delete all of your information off of each picture. Serves them right.

Anyway, I hope you found this tip helpful and I wish you the best of luck in your journey as a photographer. Lastly, I would like to give credit to Trevor Dayley over at SLR Lounge for the inspiration for this post. Trevor is an amazing wedding photographer and is also one of my favorite bloggers/writers because all of his posts are extremely helpful to beginner photographers like myself. He is someone I owe a lot of my knowledge of photography to, so thanks Trevor!

And... Thank you to my friend, Spencer, for letting me use this photo I took of him and then edited in Photoshop. Drones.