Mad File Format Science

If you’ve worked with image metadata in Photoshop, you’ve run into the problem that to save changes to the metadata, you have to save the image. With a lossy JPEG, this can mean image deterioration each time you save it.

Today, while working on a bunch of pictures from my trip to Prague, I learned about the Bridge application, which comes with Adobe Creative Suite. If you’re a really serious Photoshop user, you probably already know about Bridge, so you can skip the rest of this post. But for those who don’t, it’s an application which brings up a desktop-like interface with your directories. With the icon for any image file selected, you can choose File > Get Info from the menu and get the same file information dialog you’d get in Photoshop, including completion options from entries you’ve previously made in Photoshop. Make your changes and click OK, and they’ll appear when you open the file in Photoshop or export metadata from the file — without any change to the image data.

Better still, you can select multiple images and edit their metadata in one operation. For instance, you can set the author and copyright for all the files in a directory at once, without disturbing the other information. This is a huge improvement over editing each file’s metadata separately in Photoshop.