# Lightroom contact metadata question



## weepete (Nov 11, 2020)

Hi all, I'm just sorting myself out with a proper website now where I'm going to offer some prints for sale. As part of that I'm going to do a few social media pages to hopefully help drive a bit of traffic.

I've sorted my portfolio and set up so I can manage the images in lightroom, but I was trying to add contact information, spesifically my website address to the metadata. While it seems to be there in Lightroom, it doesn't seem to be showing up in the file details when I look at the properties tab in windows explorer.

Does anyone know if this is just because windows explorer doesn't support it or is there something I'm not doing correctly? Ideally I'd like it to contain a pointer to my website but I don't know if I should co-opt an unrelated field or not


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## zulu42 (Nov 11, 2020)

Prinys for sale? Is that some sort of fish?


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## weepete (Nov 11, 2020)

zulu42 said:


> Prinys for sale? Is that some sort of fish?



oops, fixed now! my spelling is pretty atrocious when I don't get red underlines to warn me it's off, sorry!


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## zulu42 (Nov 11, 2020)

Just poking fun, but prinys sounded like a Scottish fish supper I thought it was worth a shot


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## weepete (Nov 11, 2020)

zulu42 said:


> Just poking fun, but prinys sounded like a Scottish fish supper I thought it was worth a shot



Yeah mate, that's cool. I've a pretty thick skin so no worries I suppose it does sound quite Scottish, after all we do have saithe (pronounced say th) and cuddy so prinys could be a thing. Kinda sounds like pinnies in my head which is a Scottish word for an apron!


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## smoke665 (Nov 12, 2020)

@weepete  Best of luck on the venture, it's a difficult path. 

I'm not sure Explorer shows the details panel in preview mode. If you go to the image>properties>detail tab it should show all of the metadata available.

I haven't done much in the way of custom entries, but I've been researching ways of late. I tend to lean more toward the capabilities of Bridge. You might find this interesting   Adobe Bridge: How to add captions and metadata to lots of images, quickly! – Image Approvals Help


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## weepete (Nov 12, 2020)

smoke665 said:


> Best of luck on the venture, it's a difficult path.
> 
> I'm not sure Explorer shows the details panel in preview mode. If you go to the image>properties>detail tab it should show all of the metadata available.
> 
> I haven't done much in the way of custom entries, but I've been researching ways of late. I tend to lean more toward the capabilities of Bridge. You might find this interesting   Adobe Bridge: How to add captions and metadata to lots of images, quickly! – Image Approvals Help



Thanks Smoke, it's taking a bit to get set up and get things in place. Slow going at times.

It's not showing up in the details panel either, which is a bit confusing. I need to check I've got the bit about writing metadata checked in Lightroom. As a stop gap I've just added it into the comments from explorer, but it'd be better if I could sort it out as a preset in lightroom as the workflow would be a bit better.


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## smoke665 (Nov 12, 2020)

weepete said:


> It's not showing up in the details panel either,



I just had light go on, sorry have a lot of information stored but neural pathways are old and slow. Are you trying to read the details/see EXIF from an image on your computer or one you've uploaded to a web site???? I ran into something similar last year with another site. When you posted a JPEG, if it was to large their compression software would simply strip the EXIF data. Very annoying, because the image needed the metadata visible to verify for inclusion in a contest. I had to go down to a really small resolution and still limit the file size before the data would show up.


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## weepete (Nov 12, 2020)

smoke665 said:


> I just had light go on, sorry have a lot of information stored but neural pathways are old and slow. Are you trying to read the details/see EXIF from an image on your computer or one you've uploaded to a web site???? I ran into something similar last year with another site. When you posted a JPEG, if it was to large their compression software would simply strip the EXIF data. Very annoying, because the image needed the metadata visible to verify for inclusion in a contest. I had to go down to a really small resolution and still limit the file size before the data would show up.



Not from a website, just looking at it on my own PC. None of the IPTC sections are showing, I've altered the images in the metadata tab in lightroom, the data shows up there. I've then exported using the copyright and contact info only setting. The copyright secton and author are filled in, but there's no contact data that I'm able to read in windows. I just thought I'd have a look to see how someone else may view it. Most of the online tutorials tell you how to add it in lightroom, but none seem to show it afterward in another program. It's something I just thought should be there, so I'm a bit confused why it's not.


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## smoke665 (Nov 12, 2020)

@weepete I'm not so sure that's all of it either. Just did some tests on an image. In Lr or Bridge the information is there, even in a JPEG conversion, but if I open it in Explorer it only gives me a condensed version. Some of the background I read says Win10 won't show it all, and to use Irfanview. but that isn't good alternative.


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## weepete (Nov 12, 2020)

Thanks Smoke, that's really useful to know. I imagine that most people would look at it through the properties tab from whatever OS they are using. I'll keep putting my website address in the comments section then, and at least there will be something in there. I wouldv'e thought that it would have been displayed by default, but obviously not!


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## SquarePeg (Nov 13, 2020)

What platform are you using for your website?


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## weepete (Nov 13, 2020)

SquarePeg said:


> What platform are you using for your website?



I just went for it with Squarespace as it seemed to be the most reccomended.


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## smoke665 (Nov 13, 2020)

weepete said:


> but I was trying to add contact information, spesifically my website address to the metadata.



Like I said earlier my neural network is far from a superhighway. LOL Just dawned on me today, why are you making it so difficult????? You don't need to do all that in the metadata, just go to the print module in LR or stretch your canvas in PS to add a custom area for text. I did this in PS because I'm old, and don't want to learn something new.   In PS it's easy peasy to record an action that does it for you as the last step, then export as a JPEG, and delete the layer if you want. Here's one with a Gray background, but you can make it any color you want, any size you want, any type you want, and from your webpage set a hyperlink on the picture to automatically go to the web page when they click on it.





And here's another version done in LR, in the print module instead of printing to paper you print as a JPEG I don't think you have quite the control over the JPEG that you would by exporting though.


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## weepete (Nov 13, 2020)

Thanks Smoke, That's a great suggestion. I ended up re-doing my watermark and put my web address on that, so slightly different, but along the same lines as your suggestion. 

My thought process behind why I want to do it is a bit long winded, but it's partly because it's there and I can, partly because looking at the details tab would be something I'd do if I was looking for the owner of the copyright of an image, partly because I want to provide people mutiple chances to see my website and make it easy to get in touch, and partly because I thought is would be easy to do and instantly appear where I expected. 

I was just a bit suprised when the process didn't seem to work the way I thought it would and it made me a bit unsure if it was something simple I was missing, or if there was some quirk with Windows that meant the contact data was not read by file explorer (which seems to be the case).

Either way it probabbly doesn't affect much and I won't loose sleep over it but I do like to understand how these things work.


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