Hey y'all! How's everyone doing this week? Good I hope. Let me tell you I really love photography. Some parts more than others. I love taking the photo's and editing is just something I have to do. But there is one part that I really don't like and that's Keywording.  I really hate keywording. For those that don't know what keywording is its associating words with the photograph that you're working on. This is to help you find it in the future. It also helps if it's put on the internet and helps people find it. You can open up your browser in Lightroom Classic and type in a word like "dog" and if you've keyworded correctly all the photo's of dogs should show up.  But if you haven't put the keyword on the dog photo it won't show up. Now if you've been shooting for a while like me you might have 100,000 photo's in your Lightroom catalog. It would be very hard to find that dog photo that your looking for unless you can remember the date and year you took that photo. If your like me you can't remember what happened last week. LOL So keywording is important. Normally when you come back from a shoot say a city walk. When you bring your photo's into Lightroom you can put keywords that are common to all of the photo's. The name of the city, cityscape, street and maybe a few others. But if you've taken 100 photos they will all pop up if you put in the name of the city. So putting in individual keywords on each photo is the best way to keyword.  Maybe there is people in the photo. People, maybe they are wearing hats, Hats etc... But what a laborious job this is and if your like me you'll get the generic keywords in and that's it. Thats why keywording sucks! But what if AI could help?

A new keywording AI program from the company ON1. ON1 is a software editing company that has many cool products. From De-Noise and Sharpening programs that will work seamlessly with Lightroom. You use them as a plugin in Lightroom so it can easily become a part of your Workflow with not many hassles. The new Keywording AI software doesn't quite work that way. But you can open  up the program and point it at the photo's that you want to keywords to be added to and push a button and it does the work for you. In theory this is fantastic. No more keywording for me! LOL Well not quite. The Program works like this. First you open up the Program Keywording AI and find the folder that the photos are in that you want to keyword. Then you select the photos that you want keyworded. Push a scan button and the program goes to work looking at your photo's. It does take some time to analyze .  I selected 50 photo's and it took about 15 min. Now some of that slowness might be my computer. I have an old iMac a 2015 model. I know I need to update. LOL But it did find a lot of keywords. It even put the county that the photo's were taken that had GPS data associated with them. You can also put in keywords manually to add to what the AI found. Say you took a photo of Ava. The AI isn't going to know who Ava is so it won't add it. But you can easily add that keyword. Then you close the program and go to Lightroom and re-sync you folder that the photo's were in and all of the keywords that ON1 AI found will be in your photo. When you export that photo all of those keywords go with the photo. Now you can look up photo's with all of the Keywords that were added by the AI. Now is it perfect? No it isn't . It may put in some random keywords that don't match anything in your photo. I found that if I had some big billowing clouds the AI thought they were mountains. You can easily delete these. This is the first version of the program and I'm sure that with versions to come that it will be more precise and speedier.  This is a great start to solving the problem I have with keywording. 

Now I have just started using this program and don't quite know where I'm going to insert into my Photography Workflow. I will probably only keyword my winners not all of my photo's so I will put my generic keywords on import and after all of my editing is done then use ON1 Keyword AI for the winners. That's what I'm thinking now. I think that this is great software to do something that I hate doing and it will just get better with time. At the time of me writing this blog the price was 39 dollars but will probably go to 60ish soon.  Still a good deal to do a job that I don't want to .  Until next week keep shooting and get outside!

Hey Y’all!  How’s it going this week? Me ? Pretty good . Thanks for asking. This week I want to talk about a trip I took to my Sisters house in Greenville SC and the photography that followed. First of all Greenville SC is a larger town with all of the  features of a large town but it also has a neat downtown area with quaint shops and restaurants .  The first day after our travel to Greenville which is a 5 hour drive from my house in NC was a trip to the downtown area. We had lunch at a place called the Nose Dive and had a great meal. We then walked the town being guided by my sister and her husband.  We had a great walk that ended up in the Reedy River  park.  The park boast a suspension walking bridge a waterfall and many cool places to sit in the shade with the Reedy river rolling by.  We then went to visit my niece and her husband and we took a walk through Furman University that is a very pretty campus. The campus has a lake with a bell tower in the center of the lake on a little island.  They had a rose garden and a Japanese garden that was also very pretty.  

The next day of our trip was the 4th of July.  We lounged around and had a cookout and played games like corn hole. It stormed that night so no fireworks for us but there was lots to be heard.  The next day was more of a shopping day for me and my wife. While my sister and her husband went to work we explored some stores that we don’t have at home to see what we could see. My wife had a good time she is a professional shopper and is very good at it. LOL

The next day we traveled into the NC mountains to see some waterfalls. These waterfalls I have seen while taking trips with my camera club in the fall but I have never seen them in the Summer. We drove to DuPont State Recreation area where they have 3 really nice sets of Falls. The have High Falls, Triple Falls and Hooker falls. It has been quite a while since I have been there and it was nice to see the falls in the summer time with all of the leaves a green color instead of the multi colors of autumn.  But I still prefer the the autumn colors to the summer ones. We were planning to go see some other waterfalls but my planning was poor and the drive times were too long so we decided to just go back to my sisters house. But it was a good day and we got to see some waterfalls.

The next day was a trip to Helen Ga. This is a town that we saw on a YouTube video and thought it looked very cool. It is an older mining town that was transformed into a tourist spot with an Alpine or German feel to it. All of the houses look like they were from the Austrian hillside with quaint shops and restaurants. They have music piped into the whole town. They have tubing down the river that goes through the center of town and you can view via a foot bridge that goes over the river. The also have a roller coaster that is built into the side of the mountains there that you can control the speed of the trip down. We did not partake in the last two activities but the shopping and site seeing and the restaurants we enjoyed quite a bit. It was well worth the two hour drive to and from there.

The last day was spent thrifting at some thrift shops one of my wife's  favorite activities. Then it was the long drive home. It was a good week vacation and I got some photo's to boot! For you gear freaks like me I used a G7XMII Point and Shoot for my main camera and a iPhonePro 14 for all of my camera needs which worked out well not having to haul a lot of gear and annoying my family with camera gear. So until next week get out and shoot!

Hey y'all! How is everyone doing this week? Me? Pretty good. Hey have you ever looked at one of your old photo's and said "Hey that's cool but where did I take it?" Me too. I sometimes can sort of tell the area but not the precise place I took a shot. This is where GPS (Global Positioning System) comes into play. Being able to add the GPS coordinates to your photographs in the metadata is a great way to find those locations that you can't remember. But how do we get those mysterious numbers on our photographs and how do we use them? Thats what we are going to talk about this week.

How do I get the GPS data? Well with technology being what it is you would think that this is the simple part. Well not really. Although a few camera's have the ability to get the GPS data and put right on your photo most do not. I think that there are devices that you can hook up to some camera's but they are expensive. There is however a few couple of ways to put the GPS data on your images. The first one requires your camera to have bluetooth capabilities .  If it does you should be able to sync your camera to your mobile device to get these GPS coordinates added to your photo at the instant you take it. It then has this info burned into the file and follows the file where ever it goes. All you have to do is before your outing sync your camera and mobile device and you will get them the rest of the day. You may have to go through your camera's phone app to sync them together and there may be a setting on your camera to allow the information to go to your camera from your phone but it can be done and is pretty easy. Mine was a little difficult to set up at first but now that its set up , its easy all I have to do is choose which camera my Sony crops sensor camera or my Full frame Sony and sync and its done. The other way is to take a photo with your mobile device when you get to the site that you take photos at. When you get all of your photo's imported you can sync the metadata from the iPhone  to the rest of the photo's that were taken in that area and you will have the GPS data. The only problem with this is that you have to remember to take a mobile device photo at each different location that you go to in that day so you can get the GPS data for that location. Either way you have to remember to either sync your phone to your camera or sync a phone shot with the regular photo's in Lightroom.

So how do I used the GPS data now that I have it on my images metadata? If you're a Lightroom user like most of us are you just have to open up the Map Module and your photo's will be shown on the map where they were taken.  There is lots of things that you can do in the Map module but for me it's just getting the location of things. This is a neat feature that really doesn't cost you anymore money. Something new to try if you have never done it before. So until next week get out and shoot and note your location with GPS data.