Hi Cairie! In the past, prior to DAMS, I would use Adobe Bridge to embed information into the IPTC metadata, but only fields that were common to all assets; fields like Institution/Author, Keywords (museum,culture,art,nameofinstitution...), Website, etc. As far as I could find at the time, there was no way to push the unique metadata in Excel sheets into Bridge or some other IPTC tool. They exist, but I never could get them to work.
If you don't have Bridge (or Lightroom), you can create an action or droplet in Photoshop that will let you apply the metadata to all of the photos you select, so you don't have to do it all manually. Some CIS systems will embed that metadata for you, but as a volunteer, you probably don't have the luxury of adopting a new CIS or DAMS system. Hopefully some other tool has cropped up in the past two years since I've had to do this. It was... not fun. Hope this helps! ~P P.S. For the group: Cairie was my volunteer at BPOC, and was one of the best volunteers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:46:54 PM, Cairie Riney wrote: > I have a question about photo metadata and how to record it. So while > digitizing negatives, I've been recording the metadata into an excel > sheet. I'm following Dublin Core and added some preservation metadata > fields. Anywho, considering the institution I'm volunteering for > doesn't have a DAMS or CMS, I was thinking of embedding the metadata > using Photoshop. I successfully completed one image's embedded > metadata and it wasn't difficult or too time consuming. The REAL > question is...is it worth it? Should I just be doing the Dublin Core > metadata in the Excel sheet OR just the IPTC metadata in Photoshop? Or > is both great? Ultimately, I want to prep these photos so that if/when > they do get a DAMS, they'll be easily added to the system with all > their information.
