This past weekend our family flew down to Jupiter, Florida, to surprise my wife’s oldest sister for her 80th birthday.

We met some of the family for the first time and others my wife hadn’t seen in 39 years.

After taking this photo, I didn’t wait till I got home to work on it on the computer. I wanted to be sure to make this photo the most valuable asset it can be to our family from now on.

Here is a video to help you know how to do this in Adobe Lightroom:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45_zCZnqmqU]
After I had the photo in Adobe Lightroom editing software, I used Face Recognition technology to help identify every person in all the photos I took this weekend. Now the software, while not perfect, did a great job. However, I did have to force it to tag some of the faces.

The good thing is now inside the metadata of the image is everyone’s name in this photograph.

Metadata is “data that provides information about other data”. Two types of metadata exist: structural metadata and descriptive metadata. Structural metadata is data about the containers of data. Descriptive metadata uses individual instances of application data or the data content.

Metadata was traditionally in the card catalogs of libraries. As information has become increasingly digital, metadata is also used to describe digital data using metadata standards specific to a particular discipline. Describing the contents and context of data or data files increases their usefulness. For example, a web page may include metadata specifying what language the page is written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to find more information about the subject; this metadata can automatically improve the reader’s experience.

The main purpose of metadata is to facilitate in the discovery of relevant information, more often classified as resource discovery. Metadata also helps organize electronic resources, provide digital identification, and helps support archiving and preservation of the resource. Metadata assists in resource discovery by “allowing resources to be found by relevant criteria, identifying resources, bringing similar resources together, distinguishing dissimilar resources, and giving location information.”

This photo is from my dad’s side of the family. I know the man on the far left (even though this is sketchy) is my great grandfather, who owned the blacksmith. He is H. P. Sewell.

Who are the rest of the people? We don’t know.

Make your photos from your family more valuable. Take the time to identify who is in the picture.

Nikon D750, Sigma 24-105mm f/4 DG OS HSM Art Lens, ISO 100, ƒ/4, 1/200

This photo is of the three sisters from the weekend and my wife’s great niece. Just imagine a few generations later where they tell their children stories about who their ancestors were.

In the past, people put the names of people on the back of the print. Today embedding that information using metadata is even better.

In PhotoShop, go to the menu item File>File Info.

Under the primary table in the description box, put the people’s names in the photo. You can even put them from left to right and row 1, 2, and so on to help people in the future who will not know who anyone is in the photograph.

This screenshot is the Spotlight search on a Mac, but you can do a text search on a PC and get the same results. Because the names are embedded in a photo, you can now search and find those people. Here I put the last name in for Teubner. I didn’t even have to finish spelling it before the photos started listing for me in the search box.

I set up two umbrellas with hot-shoe flashes to make the group photos this past weekend. Once I had them set up, we had one of our family members take a picture of our family, which rarely happens. Like the cobbler, we have a few photos of us as a family.

Nikon D750, Sigma 24-105mm f/4 DG OS HSM Art Lens, ISO 180, ƒ/4, 1/250–fill flash.

While we set up and took some posed photos, we enjoyed those moments, capturing the family having fun.

Nikon D4, Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG APO OS HSM, ISO 1250, ƒ/2.8, 1/2000

Nikon D750, Sigma 24-105mm f/4 DG OS HSM Art Lens, ISO 12800, ƒ/5.6, 1/60

I feel great about this past weekend. I not only got to meet family members I didn’t know we had, but I can now look back at the photos, tell my family who is who, and help them know what a wonderful family heritage we have.