Micro Projects

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN TOOLKIT 


Adobe Bridge as tool to catalog metadata of digital assets


Universiry of Maryland

By Carmel Tse/November, 2019
University of Maryland LDT 100/300 Project



Adobe Bridge IPTC metadata
Background

In building learning materials, we often incorporate materials obtained through Open Education Resources, including infographics, photos and other images. Many OERs are under Creative Commons licenses and can be used if copyright is acknowledged and credit given. Most instructional designers use a media assets checklist to keep track of the information.

IPTC metadata

IPTC is the Global Standards Body of the News Media. IPTC has more than 30 data structures for copyright markups, and as instructional designers we only need mostly four essential copyright data plus the description  in addition to the filenames, file and image sizes which are automatically attached.

  • Copyright. This is the attribute that identifies the rightful owner of the materials along with the effective date. e.g. Copyright © 2019, Carmel C. Tse
  • Copyright status. This structure can be complicated and IPTC has left it open, but Adobe is limiting the choice in its apps to Unknown | Copyrighted | Public Domain.
  • Rights Usage Terms: IPTC describes: “This field is for free-text instructions on how the image may be legally used. e.g. ‘Permission is required from (Supplier or Creator) to publish this image’ or ‘Licensed to (Customer) for use in (publication) until (date)’.”
  • Copyright Info URL: This explains details of encoded rights expressions referenced by a link. For example: It can refer to Creative Common’s licensing terms.
  • Description. This is the metadata which is often used as "alt" tag to describe a photo in an HTML file.

    • The best way to attach the information is to tagged them as metadata. i.e. attaching the information right inside the graphics.

    Free tool to edit IPTC metadata

    There are many free and paid tools that allow access to the metadata. I use Adobe Bridge, a cross-platform freeware of the Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) suite.

    Pros

    Bridge stands out amongst the choices as it has a very easy to use Graphical User Interface and the metadata uses are common among all asset files used by other applications in CC.

    Cons

    While Bridge is a great tool to tag each asset, it does not have an interface to list all the assets in a directory.

    Exiftool to list metadata
    The ah-ha moment

    By Carmel Tse/November, 2019
    University of Maryland LDT 100/300 Project

    While Bridge is a great tool to tag each asset, it does not have an interface to list all the assets in a directory.

    To compensate for this, I have written a Unix tool using Exiftool by Phil Harvey of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. ExifTool is a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files.

    1. Download the Exiftool and follow the installation. The Unix code I used to do the extracting was:

    exiftool -r -common -rights -marked -usageterms -webstatement /dir > exiftool_out.txt

    2. Replace /dir with full path of image repository.

    3. The output is an Exiftool_out.txt file. Seeing all my assets and their metadata in a project listed in a spreadsheet the first time after one command really gave me the "ah-ha" moment.