The hard truth is that doing things in a certain way, in a certain order, and at a certain stage of the process saves you from having to repeat previous steps. The easiest time to caption your images is at the very beginning. If you can develop this habit, life will be, well, if not good, at least a whole lot better than if you let your files settle into a state of chaos.

Here is a brief guide to annotating your images. Do it right and buyers will be able to do text searches and find your work when they are looking for it. Ignore it and you will need to find another way to get those images in front of buyers. Text is the language of computers, of the internet, of search engines. Please keep in mind that you are not annotating your images for me, or for this, the next to the last assignment in your least favorite course. You are annotating images so you will be able to sell your images to buyers who are looking for them.

Because annotations have several distinct purposes it is worth separating these functions from the beginning. If all of these purposes are not interesting to you, there's a good chance that at least one of them is.

The first purpose is to help people using text based systems find your image. (The web, an image database,...) This starts with you, when a prospective client calls looking for that image of a cat in the sun when you were in Greece eight years and sixty thousand images ago. (Caption contains cat & Country = Greece instead of some distant memory of DSC-00057294.xyz) It extends to the stock section of your own web site, and to the information you give to your stock agency when you hand over a CD of your images. (If you do not tell them, how will they know?)

The second purpose for annotating your images is to make it clear to anyone looking at them that you are the author of the image, that you would like to be paid for the use of the image, and that it would be in the viewer's best interest not to reproduce that image without your permission. (Please register the copyright to your images so you have gumption when you need it. Or learn to love selling insurance.)

All well and good, but pointless if you do not do something about the third purpose of annotations, to give the viewer a way to contact you or your agent so they can do the right thing, license your image, and pay for its use.

While simply having a written record that corresponds to each image is valuable information, getting the maximum benefit from annotations requires that you embed them into each image file. Do this with the CS or CS2 version of Photoshop; iView; PhotoMechanic; Bridge; Lightroom; Aperture; or any number of other products that are or will be available. Sorry to say, some current camera manufacturers have treated image annotations in a proprietary way, giving us non-standard implementations of these functions that other applications have difficulty understanding. Stick with methods that are standard and which have been adopted by the greater part of the image using industry.

People can only find information if you put it where they look for it. Putting it there requires you to imagine where they will look. Seems simple, but lots of programmers are making good money working on the problem of balancing search simplicity with search efficiency. You will probably not outguess them, so your best bet is to simply play their game. Put information where they expect to find it.

In database terminology, each part of an annotation is a field or column; each image represents a data record or row. Whether you display your annotations in a databse or embed them in an image, it is important to understand what each field is used for. Here is a summary of the most common and important fields.

These are fields that you can set and forget. You will always be the author of your images. Until you move or change your domain name, you will probably have the same address, phone number, and web address. Change these fields when you need to, and set them as defaults until then:

Author: The photograper who created the image.

Credit: Either your name or your business's name. If you are using a copyright credit, you'll need to change this each year.

Description Writer: AKA Caption Writer or just plain Writer. Your name if you are writing your own captions, or else the person who writes your captions.

Author Title: iView and other IPTC standard applications. If you have a position that you want to note, it would go here.

Instructions: If you have no special instructions you can give a blanket statement about the use of your images and what you would like people to do to license them.

Source: Your agent, your web site, or at the very least, your name.

Copyright: Your proper copyright notice for this image during the current year.
 
Credit: If you are using a copyright credit, this will change once a year, and will be the same as Copyright.

Location: iView only

City: Nearest to shoot

State:

Country:

Date Created:

Title: Shortest description of subject.
 
Headline: A longer title

Description: Also labeled as Caption in some applications. A text description of the subject shown in the image.

Keywords: Other words that will help you to locate the image that may not appear in the words above. Keywords can be limited to a fixed set of words to force searchers to make choices that are useful.

Category: Genre in iView. This is a way to lump images into groups of similar types of subject matter. Categories are defined by the user, but you may need to conform to the system your agent is using. It's also possible that they will prefer for you to leave this blank and use it for their own categories.

Here is an example of these fields as seen in Photoshop's File > File Info panel and in iView. I also have a page with some quick help in setting up a metadata template.