Photo Editing, Tutorials, Photography News, and More
This blog covers a range of topics from Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon, iPhone Photography, and more. If you want to see more of my actual photography work, visit my Portfolio and Photo Journal blog.
Why Captions, Keywords, and Other Metadata Still Matters in 2026
After my recent video on using Siri to add captions and keywords to photos, someone on social media asked a question that kind of took me aback: “What's the point?” I had assumed everyone who was in any way into photography understood the benefit of adding keywords and captions, but I guess not. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense in a way. Phones recognise faces. Most software (except Lightroom Classic, because…Adobe) can find "dog on a beach" without a single piece of user-generated metadata, and AI seems to know what's in every picture. So why bother writing anything by hand?
Search Replace Transfer, An Extremely Useful Metadata Tool for Lightroom
I’ve long complained about the lack of certain metadata functionality in Lightroom. I don’t particularly like the interface for entering metadata as it is, but the software lacks certain key features that I have long missed since moving from Aperture..... Recently I set about trying to find a solution, and it came in the form of a plug-in from John Beardsworth called “Search Replace Transfer”
Quick tip: See Previous Metadata Entries in Lightroom
There are a lot of hidden and not so obvious features littered throughout Lightroom. I've previously expressed my dislike of the interface for dealing with metadata in the software, but it does have a few tricks up its sleeve. For example, if you start typing in any of the fields, it will auto fill in the entries based on previous results.