It’s not without a good reason that Apple decided to dramatically improve the Search feature in Tiger, giving birth to Spotlight.

The metadata are basically “data about data“. When referring to Digital photography, they are the information coming along with the picture, such as exposure value, aperture or flash intensity.

But it can be much more than that…

In this article, I’ll talk about the “extra” metadata. Pieces of information that you add to your own photos (or any document really) to help you make this photo unique.

And those are the most valuable information because you decide, based on the the context, the situation and particular occasion, what keyword to add to make it “unique”.

Metadata are actually the only piece of information you can alter, besides the name of the file, to achieve uniqueness…

I try to answer this question “Who and what are in this photo?” The contextual information surrounding the data will help you in many ways.

If you start shooting on a regular basis, you’ll notice that whatever type of structure, organization, image management you use, if you can’t locate a specific photo easily and rapidly, taking photos will become a real pain in the ass!

As a professional, you can’t even think about procrastinating when it comes to that!

Back to Tiger and how it’s a powerful ally when it comes to that! When Tiger launched in 2005 it brought with it Spotlight for unparalleled searching capabilities.

A large factor in this amazing new tech was the ability of the operating system to leverage metadata in files. You now could search and find a file based on its metadata!!

Here is an example… a client wants to buy a photo of that cool girl jumping off a building. Meaning, I need to find the photo of Karina Hollekim when she was BASE-jumping of the Jin Mao Tower!

Now that wasn’t too long ago, so I remember correctly, it’s in my “BASE Jump” folder from 2005, and I even remember it was in September (or was it October already??).

But then, even if I can locate the exact folder, I’ll end up looking through 3-4 maybe 6,000 photos that I took during that event. If you’re lucky, you did use a sub-folder to sort the “action photos” from the “lifestyle photos” like I do… but even then, I still have to locate one file amongst over a thousand of them.

So just imagine, you need to locate a specific photo 5-10 years from now?!?

By using Spotlight, I just need to type “Karina+Hollekim+Jin+Mao” into my Spotlight search engine and voil?†! In just 5 seconds, I have a selection of only a few photos and if I add some more specific keywords like “killer+360¬? jump” I can spot that ONE photo I was looking for in less time that I need to say “AWESOME”

Time is money, that’s no secret but even if you’re not trying to locate a photo to sell it to someone, finding it quickly and as painfully as possible is the ultimate goal.

Spotlight is one very good, powerful, easy to use tool. You can use many different tool to achieve similar results actually.

Especially if you decide to work with Adobe Lightroom or Aperture, they come with their own search engine enabling you to manage hundreds of thousands of photos without breaking a sweat.

If you wanna learn more on how to effectively use the metadata in your everyday life, not only for your photos but for all of your documents, I suggest you read the excellent article The Apple Blog posted not too long ago, it’s a gold mine to really take advantage of this new friend “metadata”!