This quick tutorial will walk you through how to embed metadata such as keywords and title into your stock photos using Adobe Bridge tagging system. If you do not embed data into your JPEG images before submitting them, you will have to manually copy paste titles and keywords for every stock photo agency. This takes a lot of time.

Why Tagging in Adobe Bridge, Not Adobe Lightroom ?

The easiest to understand method to embed metadata manually is to use Adobe Bridge. Yes, Adobe Bridge, not Adobe Lightroom. I would not recommend Adobe Lightroom because it does not preserve the order of keywords. Instead, Adobe Lightroom reorders keywords in alphabetical order.

In my previous article on how to properly keyword and title your stock photos and videos, I explained the importance of putting your most relevant keywords first. This is because the order matters for certain stock agencies, such as Adobe Stock. If the most important keywords do not come first, the rankings for your images in search results will suffer and you will likely get smaller sales. Also, Alamy wants you to indicate 10 supertags, which are the most important keywords. If you put the most relevant tags first and preserve the order before uploading to Alamy, tagging those 10 supertags will be an easy matter.

Also, Adobe Bridge is free. That’s right! You can download Adobe Bridge and use it free of charge with no paid subscription or one-time payments required.

Adobe Bridge Tagging Metadata

To embed metadata into your images using Adobe Bridge tagging system, right-click on your image and choose “File Info” from the menu.

The most important fields to fill out are Document Title, Description and Keywords. Keywords must be separated by either comma or semicolon. Input this information into each field one by one. After you are finished, hit okay and you are done.

Preset Templates in Adobe Bridge

Also, in Adobe Bridge you can create templates, which are presets containing certain data (titles, copyright, keywords, etc) that can be applied to a batch of files. First, take one stock photo and input data that you want to apply to other images in the “File Info” window. For instance, I will have my image copyrighted with a “All right reserved” notice. Also, suppose I have many images in my library that are related to food. I input several keywords into this preset template that I can later embed into other images. Then, I go to the drop-down menu for templates as shown below, hit export and name this preset as food.

So, the next time I see food-related images, I can select them in Adobe Bridge and use either “Append Metadata” or “Replace metadata” commands from the “Tools” menu item as shown below.

The “Replace Metadata” option lets you clear all data from the selected files and copy paste data from the preset. The “Append Metadata” option will preserve data from the original file and add data from the the preset.

The advantage of embedding comes into play when you upload images to stock photo websites. Stock photography platforms will recognize and populate your keywords and titles from the stock photo metadata and you do not have to copy paste anything. All you need to do is to indicate categories and maybe some other agency-specific data. Most importantly, the order of keywords is preserved if you use Adobe Bridge.

In our next article, we show how to embed metadata into stock photo images even faster using the free Exiftool program.