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How To Add And Edit Metadata In Photoshop

Metadata isn’t important to the average person. This is despite the fact that the average person takes photos on their phone and uploads them online. The metadata on these photos contains the exact location the photo was taken. It’s a captured automatically and no one really thinks twice. That said, metadata isn’t necessarily a bad thing especially if you’re a photographer or a designer. Cameras save a lot of information that photographers need like the make of the camera and the settings it was on when a particular photo was captured. Photoshop has the potential to do the same. The program doesn’t write much metadata to an image by default. You can however add and edit metadata in Photoshop easily.

Metadata In Photoshop

Open a Photoshop file i.e., a PSD, or open an image in Photoshop. If you open a photograph, it will have quite a bit of metadata. You can edit this metadata if you want. If you created the image in Photoshop, it will have very little metadata. The default settings for metadata in Photoshop add the name of the author and the date it was created it on, among other things.

To add metadata, open the File menu and go to File Info.

A new window will open where you can add and edit metadata. Photoshop supports the XMP standard for storing metadata. It was developed by Adobe and stores a substantial amount of information. Broadly speaking, you enter an author name and title, document name, and copyright status as well as a description, keywords, and rating for the file.

You can also edit or add camera data from the Camera Data tab. The GPS Data tab lets you edit the location data for the image.

If the file you opened is an image you made entirely in Photoshop, go to the Raw Data tab on this window to see what data was added to it by default. You can edit it, of course. After you add and edit metadata in Photoshop, the image you save as well as the file will be saved with this data.

Reading Metadata

You can read the metadata of any file natively in your OS, regardless if you use Windows or macOS. Just go to the Properties or Details of a file to view the data. Your OS will be able to show you most of the data but not all of it. You can use a dedicate metadata viewer to read the metadata or you can just open an image in Photoshop and see what data is in the Raw Data tab.

2 Comments

  1. Before a couple of years we tried this technique with stuffing kewords into the meta data of an image and guess what – our experimental website was ban from google in less than 72 hours. I honestly don’t know how is now, but be carefull with altering meta data with keywords. It’s a risky play.