The most efficient way to add metadata to your photos (copyright, contact info, etc.) is to do it on import. But what if you forget, or what if the metadata changes (your address or email changes), or what if you have old photos that never got the metadata in the first place?

Aperture provides a fantastic batch editor, which allows you to replace, erase, or even add to existing metadata fields.

A video version of this tip is included at the end. Enjoy!

Batch Change

The menu command is under Metadata > Batch Change… and is available once you’ve selected one or more images. There are three sections to this window; Time Adjustment, Version Name, and Metadata. In this post we’ll be focusing just on the metadata fields.

By default, you’ll see the basic metadata set, which includes Caption, Keywords, Image City, State/Province, Image Country and Copyright Notice.

The Batch Change window in Aperture 3

The first thing you’ll see is the drop-down menu allowing you to access presets, but we’ll come back to that later.

Under the drop-down are two radio buttons; Append and Replace. As the names infer, whatever metadata you include here will be added to, or will replace, the existing data.

NOTE: If a field isn’t checked/enabled, that data is left alone, even if Replace is chosen. So for example if you already have your copyright in the copyright field, and you choose Replace here, but you do NOT enter anything or enable the Copyright checkbox, that copyright data will be left alone.

Now all you have to do is enter whatever data it is you want to add. As you type into a field and tab to the next one, that field will automatically be enabled.

Also if you want to clear a field, while in Replace mode, you can enable it but not enter anything, and the field will show “Clear Values”, indicating that any existing data will be cleared away.

As you enter metadata, the fields are enabled for you

Metadata preset usage

Going back to the top drop-down menu, you can create as many different collections of metadata as you like. But more importantly, you can pre-populate them. For example, here’s a screenshot from my own system. Many of these fields are pre-populated, however some are left blank. The metadata that rarely changes (name, copyright, address, etc.) is already entered. Fields that will change depending on the photos are left blank, meaning that they will show up in the list, but not be pre-populated. Notice that they are also not pre-checked, so you don’t accidentally erase any data that you may have there.

You can create your own pre-populated metadata presets

These are the same metadata presets that show up in the import window, by the way.

Making your metadata presets

To create your own presets, go to that drop-down menu, and choose Edit Presets… which opens the window you see below. As with any other presets in Aperture, you can use the gear menu to duplicate, import and export, and more. With your preset selected on the left, simply enable the fields on the right that you want to appear in your list. Add any relavent metadata where appropriate, and leave blank (but selected), any that you want to show up in the list — such as Caption and Keywords in the sample below.

Creating your own metadata presets is easy and powerful

And that’s all there is to it!

Video tip

Here’s the video version of the tip…