Writing Metadata To Your Files
Now, we've been assigning keywords/tags to our digital supplies and photos for a while.
To make sure we don't lose any of our work, we want to write all this information into our files. Here's how to do that.
- Click on File>Write Keyword Tag and Properties Info to Photos
Organizer will ask if we want to write the catalog data for all of the currently displayed photos to their files.
- Click Yes
And now you can go have some coffee or do some laundry because if you have a lot of files, this will take awhile. But remember, it's all part of the process of keeping our digital supplies well organized, which in turn makes it so much easier for us to create those beautiful layouts and get our memories recorded.
Happy scrapping!
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Does this get saved automatically at any point or is this something we have to do regularly? I assume we should also highlight the entire catalogue and then “write”it?
Thanks for the info. I’m going to try to remember to do this every time before I back up.
If you open or edit the file in the Editor the metadata is written to the file.
Otherwise, we need to do it manually (I’ve got that one on the wish list for PSE13!!)
Thank you so much! I did not know that Elements was only recording my tags, etc., in an only Elements file. I thought it was automatically writing to the .img sidecar file. No wonder Lightroom has been unable to see most of my ratings and tags from Elements! Once again, thanks and let me go bookmark your site.
Happy to help!
Is an incremental process? Or do we have to write the full set of metadata time and again? To me, this is quite relevant: I’m doing it for the first time and after three hours of patience, I’m at 70% (38000 files).
Hi Rik – it will take a while. I usually let it run overnight if do this for the whole catalog.
For me, this is an issue (I have a rather large catalog of 45 000 pictures). There might be a way around this cumbersome writing of metadata. Let’s assume that I wrote all metadata to all my files on e.g. June 1, 2017. After that date, I’ve done some editing on a number of files (including assignment of tags, is that considered ‘editing”?). If I now would be able to select all files that were edited after said date, I would be able to write metadata to only these files. A sort of incremental update, so to speak. Can this be done?
Yes, you can write the metadata to selected files only. You would need to be able to identify them though. So for example you can find all files imported on one day in the Find menu then select them and Write the metadata to just those files.
Elements Organizer can write metadata to graphic files, but can it also read such data from files? Or does it only read metadata from its catalogue?
Yes, it reads metadata from the files as well.