write tags to photos

joshhuntnm

Element has a command to write keyword tags to photos. I understand what this does but don't understand the ins and outs on why you would or would not want to do that. Any thoughts.

jfriend

joshhuntnm wrote:

Element has a command to write keyword tags to photos. I understand what this does but don't understand the ins and outs on why you would or would not want to do that. Any thoughts.

As Elements normally works, the tags you apply to photos are stored in the Elements database. They are not written to the image files themselves. If you only use the tags inside of Elements, that's fine - it doesn't really matter where they are stored since Elements associates them with the right image for you.

But ... if you want to take your images somewhere else (like onto Smugmug) and you want those tags to still be associated with your images, you HAVE to write them to the actual image file since that's all another application is likely to understand.

For example, if you have assigned a bunch of keywords in Elements and you want those keywords to show up in Smugmug when you upload the JPEGs to Smugmug, you must write those tags to the images themselves before uploading them.

Richard

joshhuntnm wrote:

Element has a command to write keyword tags to photos. I understand what this does but don't understand the ins and outs on why you would or would not want to do that. Any thoughts.

If you want people to find your pics on the Web easily, then you will want to have keywords for them. That's how most people will find your work on Google and other search engines. Smugmug lets you enter keywords directly if you want, but if there are keywords in the files themselves, it will pick them up automatically. Since you probably want keywords somewhere for your own archive searches, it will save you some work if you write them to the photos themselves.

Cheers,