Metadata and Cro-Magnon Lenses

The way I have Lightroom set up is really important to the way I work, and that's because I need to be able to look at images by lens or by camera model. To achieve this, I use smart collections in Lightroom. A smart collection is a special type of collection that can automatically add images to it based on certain criteria. In my case, I set up smart collections for different lenses and camera models, which makes it easy to find specific images later on.

However, there's one major problem when working with older lenses like the Nikon lens I'm using in this video. The lens model field is completely blank, and no matter how hard I try, I just can't seem to change that data. I've asked Adobe about this before, but for reasons that are beyond my understanding, they won't allow me to access or manipulate certain metadata fields.

So, how do I work around this limitation? That's where an app called Exif Editor comes in. This app allows me to import images and edit their metadata, which is a game-changer when it comes to working with older lenses that don't have any metadata associated with them. To use Exif Editor, I create presets for each lens I use frequently, and then apply those presets to the images as soon as they're imported into Lightroom.

When I import an image into Lightroom, I right-click on it and select "Show in Finder," which opens up a finder window with all my recently imported images. From there, I drag and drop the images into Exif Editor and apply the preset. The app then updates the metadata fields with the new information, including the lens name.

The next step is to go back to Lightroom and select all the images that were just edited in Exif Editor. Then, I right-click on them and select "Read from File," which gives me a warning that any edits I made will be lost if I start editing again. Unfortunately, this is true, but it's worth doing the import process correctly before starting to edit.

Once I've updated the metadata fields in Lightroom, I can create smart collections for my lens and camera model. This makes it easy to find specific images later on and helps me work more efficiently with my older lenses. With a little creativity and the right tools, working with older lenses like this Nikon lens is not only fun but also rewarding.

Next Steps

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to start talking about older lens characteristics that make them unique and worth shooting with. These lenses often have a lot of character that's hard to replicate with modern lenses, and I'm excited to explore why photographers love working with them. If you're curious about this topic too, please drop me a comment below. I'd love to hear from you and start a conversation about the joys of working with older lenses.

The Art of Photography

In this video series, I'll be sharing tips and techniques for improving your photography skills. From editing software to camera settings, we'll cover it all. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced photographer looking to improve your craft, there's something for everyone in this series.

Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of The Art of Photography. If you're interested in learning more about Lightroom and other editing software, head over to squarespace.com to take advantage of their free trial. When you're ready to launch your own website or start a new project, use the code AOP10 at checkout to save 10% off your first purchase.

Exif Editor

For those who may not know, Exif Editor is an app available for Mac that allows users to edit metadata fields in images. It's a powerful tool that can be used with many editing software applications, including Lightroom.

Note: The text has been expanded into full paragraphs and sections to create a readable article.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone today we're going to do a lens days video and i want to talk about manual focusing techniques i've done a lot of lenses videos and by very much a popular request in the next couple weeks next couple months i want to start getting into some older manual focus lenses that have really specifically interesting characteristics that you can employ into your photography i want to talk about using these lenses with modern cameras but i think before we get into that i thought it would be great to do a video just talking about manual focusing techniques how i set my camera up which may not be earth shattering to some of you you probably already use some of these but i also want to talk about how i set my computer up because one thing that drives me nuts is when files don't have the right metadata on them the way i organize my lightroom catalog is i create smart collections by lens and by camera and because i do a lot of camera reviews a lot of lens reviews i need to be able to go find things and when you're dealing with older manual focus lenses let's say you've got like on this camera i've got like this old nikon lens which is a great lens but it was never designed to go on this body and this body was never really designed to see this lens and so you don't get any metadata about aperture or what the lens is well there's an app that you can use and i want to show you how i sort a little bit of that out so welcome to the lens days video we're going to talk about manual focus a lot of this was actually inspired by this lens that i'm using which is a voigtlander this is a 50 millimeter apo lanthar f2 lens that's not brand new but it's kind of new to me and it's something i got curious about i will say this is one of my favorite 50 millimeter lenses ever made for any system is just absolutely beautiful and i wanted to do a review on this and a lot of my review has to do with how easy i actually found manual focus i'm one of those people who uses autofocus quite a bit especially since i've been on the sony system and they have such a great autofocus system but once i figured a few things out this actually became really easy to do in pretty second nature and honestly since i've been using the voigtlander and i've gotten used to manual focus i've found that i'm actually pulling my g master lenses and my native sony lenses and i turn auto focus off in certain circumstances just because it's easier for me to manually pick the focus point and i think that's something that just it's another skill that as photographers we have to understand when to use the tools that we have now as i mentioned i'm someone who loves autofocus and i think especially in the last 10 years we've seen leaps and bounds with autofocus technology in particular the move to mirrorless sony are the leader with this when you look at something like this system with the a9 and the right lenses and you're able to like autofocus you know some crazy amount it's like it's almost real time how it's focusing this is a huge boon for video and it's also a huge boon for sports photography and i think it's great and i think any of the major brands now have incredible iaf doesn't matter what you're using fujifilm canon nikon sony they all do an amazing job with eye autofocus however there are times where i'm not shooting a human being maybe it's a little more abstract in nature the shot that i have set up and i need to just be able to not have the camera arbitrarily select something or have to like lock on to the focus tracking in the middle it's just easier for me to go into manual focus and get the shot the old school way but first let's talk about adapters for a second because this is actually an important part of this equation now typically you can go on amazon or you want b h or adorama or wherever you like to buy camera gear and you look for adapters and this is one of the things that when i initially got my first mirrorless camera which was the sony nex-7 it was really cool because all of a sudden i have this wide range of choices of older lenses that i could adapt back then sony didn't have a really good selection of lenses everything was a lot newer and so this was a huge selling point on the system so i've owned a lot of adapters and they are not all created equal the adapter that's on here right now this is the old sony nikkor s 50 millimeter f 1.4 which is actually a really cool lens but i've got this on a photo say i think is how you say it photo say adapter these are usually the ones you find that come in at these unbelievable price points i also want to note that in general you're gonna get what you pay for so i'm sorry if anybody from photosay is watching this video right now but even though these are very affordable i found that they're in general pretty flimsy the brand i would recommend is actually this one and this is actually on a lens right now this is a nova flex you're going to see a huge price change between novaflex and photosay and novoflex are definitely the most robust in terms of build and you're going to get what you pay for it now here's the thinking and here's the mentality that that and i've done it too is that let's say you've got some old 50 canon fd lenses or nikon lenses and you want to use them and so you go online i need an adapter and you go through the list and you're like oh here's one for like 20 bucks and here's one for 250 and you like do the double take and it's like the whole psychology of buying a 250 adapter i'm just throwing these numbers out these are expensive though but you're buying an expensive adapter to put on an under 50 lens it's just doesn't match up but you have to think of it beyond that that this will mount multiple lenses and you do get what you pay for essentially i've found even the photo says i mean they will work i've never had one that was like not aligned correctly or slightly the wrong length i mean i get full focus functionality out of any lens but that is something to be aware of is that you do get what you pay for novaflex is my preferred go-to these days and this is kind of all i buy i do have some photo saves from the old days but kind of replacing them right now let's talk about how i set up the camera now i'm using sony's in this example but this same approach applies to whatever you're using so if you're a canon shooter you're going to be able to do the same stuff by signing custom buttons and setting it up the same way if you're a fujifilm user not it doesn't matter i'm just using this as the example so take notes of what we're doing on here so one thing i will say about sony's though and if you're so sure you know i'm talking about so if you're using voigtlander or zeiss or any of the companies that make manual focus lenses that are native to e-mount in other words this is a voigtlander lens that works directly at e-mount i don't have to adapt it it also passes the exif metadata through into the camera so it will record what lens what aperture the whole thing that's really nice but they also have a feature that by default in sony cameras is just annoying to no end as soon as you turn the focus dial it kicks into what we call manual focus assist which essentially zooms in for critical focus into the middle of the screen this is fine for certain types of photography but i just annoyed beyond believing i can't deal with it because first of all it just distracted me into where am i in the image then i have to move the joystick or the dial around to move that and i'm not even paying attention to my composition anymore and by the time i'm oriented if you're trying to shoot street photography or something of that nature the moment's gone even if you're trying to shoot just candids of relatives or family members it's the moment's over so i set them up a very different way by default i turn that off now manual focus assist is a great functionality and it is great for like landscapes or something where you're set up and you want to check out critical focus or you're doing product photography let's say what i do is i reassign that to one of the top function keys so i can get back to it i turn it off by default but if i press c2 then i can go into critical focus and actually when you go in that way it asks you before it zooms in where do you want to zoom into so it's just a much better way to work so you're probably thinking ted you must have incredible eyes if you can just focus off the screen well a little secret i don't it's called getting older but fortunately there is a remedy for this and it is called focus peaking and what focus peaking allows you to do is when you have this turned on as it adds a layer of highlight and you can change the color i have mine set to white but you can change it to red or green or depending on what your camera supports and this allows me to see the area that's in focus it looks for high contrast areas in the image and allows me to focus in and i this is the fastest way to work because once you get used to this you can dial focus in right on the eyes you can focus in right on whatever it is that you're trying to do in the composition it really doesn't take that much time at all sure it's not as fast as autofocus but it is pretty accurate and it's fast enough and it's fast enough certainly for using manual focus or especially older manual focus lenses so the way i have my camera set up is i use custom function dials to be able to turn things on and off so i already mentioned the first one well the second one won't work right now because i have a manual focus lens already on here but c3 over here on the top left is what i do for my focus selection so if i'm using a g master lens let's say and i'm in auto focus and i want to turn it off that's where i do it i can bounce back and forth between the two so you'll get manual focus or the very different flavors of of autofocus that you have as options the second thing i do is i assign a button for turning peaking on and off and what i do is i use actually it's the control dial on the back and if you know this but on sony cameras there's actually four buttons that you can turn that into so i just have the bottom one so i'm press that once we're going to turn peaking off and then i can turn peaking on and so that's a great way that if i for some reason don't want it then i can turn it off you can bounce back and forth the other option that i like to do and this is a little bit annoying about sony cameras they will do animal iaf and human iaf but not at the same time so i set that toggle to the trash can and so when i hit the trashcan when i'm not in review mode it will toggle back and forth between human and animal iaf so anyway that's how i set my camera but i think it's also important to be consistent so i own several sonys so it's a little bit of a pain but i go set it up this way on every camera that way whatever i'm shooting i can do it quickly and i think that's the name of the game is understanding how to manual focus using level speaking and then also you want to be able to learn how to do it really quick and so consistency is key on this so i mentioned the voigtlander lenses and even the zeiss lokzia lenses which are manual focus they're designed to work with sony cameras well they will pass all the exif communication to the camera so this is aperture information the make and model of the lens if you're using something like this the nikor s f 50 millimeter f4 well this is completely foreign there's no communication happening in here at all you just have basically have a metal tube here it's an adapter that doesn't have any data that passes through it so how do we get this to show up correctly in lightroom or capture one or whatever it is that we're doing well that's what i want to get into next but real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag-and-drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so let's talk about metadata and cro-magnon lenses for just a second so the way that i have lightroom set up that's really important to the way that i work is i need to be able to look at images by lens or by camera model and so the way i set this up in my lightroom catalog is by using smart collections so you set up a smart collection and you give it some metadata criteria to consider and what it'll do is any image in your entire catalog that meets that criteria will sit in that smart collection and so it's really easy and obvious to do by camera model or even by lens and the problem that i have here is that like with an old lens like this nikkor lens there is no metadata the lens make for lens model field is completely blank and so you would think well i'll just go into lightroom and i'll change that data and well guess what for reasons unbeknownst to me that i can't even fathom you can't it's actually something that i would like to ask adobe next time i have the opportunity and there must be a reason because that's actually fairly common most photo editors do not let you access or manipulate or change certain data fields but i just need to change the lens field so the workaround that i found for this is by using an app called exif editor now this is on the mac side of things there probably is a windows equivalent i don't know off the top of my head if any of you do feel free to drop a comment below and share with others but this is what i do so exif editor allows me to go in you can drag and drop and bring in images and you can just change metadata fields in there and so what i do is i create presets and i do them for each lens that i use frequently and so what you do is you do this on import this is very important because if you don't do this on import then it's hard to find these images later so step one is i go ahead i put a card in and i bring images into lightroom and you know you see your recently imported images folder so what i do is i right click on any one of those images and i say show in finder and this opens up a finder window with the images in them then i can drag and drop all of my images i drag and drop them onto exif editor i apply a preset and then i hit save and it's going to go through and it's just going to do nothing but alter the metadata and i only have the one field set up and it's the lens name you got to give it a name and you got to know what it is because then you can create your smart folder in lightroom now the next step you have to do is you have to come back to lightroom and then when you're in that images folder nothing gets applied dynamically so you have to select all of the images that you just brought in you're going to right click you're going to go down to metadata and you're going to go read from file what this is going to do is give you a little warning you'll say hey if you've done any edits they're going to go away and unfortunately that's the case so this is another reason why you want to do it when you import images before you start to edit things but anyway this will go ahead and update all the metadata fields and then you can create your smart collections and then you can have them display there so that is my method of working now this sounds complex but i promise once you have it set up and you have your camera set up the right way with your custom function keys so you can get to things quickly manual focus shooting can be a lot of fun it can be easy to catalog and it makes it just kind of a joy to work with some of these cool older lenses that have a lot of character to them so this is one thing we're going to be doing moving forward and i'm pretty excited about because over the next couple weeks i want to start talking about older lens characteristics how they differ from modern lenses why you would want to shoot with something like this and i can spoil it for you now some of these lenses have some really amazing character to them so i would love to know what you guys think drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone today we're going to do a lens days video and i want to talk about manual focusing techniques i've done a lot of lenses videos and by very much a popular request in the next couple weeks next couple months i want to start getting into some older manual focus lenses that have really specifically interesting characteristics that you can employ into your photography i want to talk about using these lenses with modern cameras but i think before we get into that i thought it would be great to do a video just talking about manual focusing techniques how i set my camera up which may not be earth shattering to some of you you probably already use some of these but i also want to talk about how i set my computer up because one thing that drives me nuts is when files don't have the right metadata on them the way i organize my lightroom catalog is i create smart collections by lens and by camera and because i do a lot of camera reviews a lot of lens reviews i need to be able to go find things and when you're dealing with older manual focus lenses let's say you've got like on this camera i've got like this old nikon lens which is a great lens but it was never designed to go on this body and this body was never really designed to see this lens and so you don't get any metadata about aperture or what the lens is well there's an app that you can use and i want to show you how i sort a little bit of that out so welcome to the lens days video we're going to talk about manual focus a lot of this was actually inspired by this lens that i'm using which is a voigtlander this is a 50 millimeter apo lanthar f2 lens that's not brand new but it's kind of new to me and it's something i got curious about i will say this is one of my favorite 50 millimeter lenses ever made for any system is just absolutely beautiful and i wanted to do a review on this and a lot of my review has to do with how easy i actually found manual focus i'm one of those people who uses autofocus quite a bit especially since i've been on the sony system and they have such a great autofocus system but once i figured a few things out this actually became really easy to do in pretty second nature and honestly since i've been using the voigtlander and i've gotten used to manual focus i've found that i'm actually pulling my g master lenses and my native sony lenses and i turn auto focus off in certain circumstances just because it's easier for me to manually pick the focus point and i think that's something that just it's another skill that as photographers we have to understand when to use the tools that we have now as i mentioned i'm someone who loves autofocus and i think especially in the last 10 years we've seen leaps and bounds with autofocus technology in particular the move to mirrorless sony are the leader with this when you look at something like this system with the a9 and the right lenses and you're able to like autofocus you know some crazy amount it's like it's almost real time how it's focusing this is a huge boon for video and it's also a huge boon for sports photography and i think it's great and i think any of the major brands now have incredible iaf doesn't matter what you're using fujifilm canon nikon sony they all do an amazing job with eye autofocus however there are times where i'm not shooting a human being maybe it's a little more abstract in nature the shot that i have set up and i need to just be able to not have the camera arbitrarily select something or have to like lock on to the focus tracking in the middle it's just easier for me to go into manual focus and get the shot the old school way but first let's talk about adapters for a second because this is actually an important part of this equation now typically you can go on amazon or you want b h or adorama or wherever you like to buy camera gear and you look for adapters and this is one of the things that when i initially got my first mirrorless camera which was the sony nex-7 it was really cool because all of a sudden i have this wide range of choices of older lenses that i could adapt back then sony didn't have a really good selection of lenses everything was a lot newer and so this was a huge selling point on the system so i've owned a lot of adapters and they are not all created equal the adapter that's on here right now this is the old sony nikkor s 50 millimeter f 1.4 which is actually a really cool lens but i've got this on a photo say i think is how you say it photo say adapter these are usually the ones you find that come in at these unbelievable price points i also want to note that in general you're gonna get what you pay for so i'm sorry if anybody from photosay is watching this video right now but even though these are very affordable i found that they're in general pretty flimsy the brand i would recommend is actually this one and this is actually on a lens right now this is a nova flex you're going to see a huge price change between novaflex and photosay and novoflex are definitely the most robust in terms of build and you're going to get what you pay for it now here's the thinking and here's the mentality that that and i've done it too is that let's say you've got some old 50 canon fd lenses or nikon lenses and you want to use them and so you go online i need an adapter and you go through the list and you're like oh here's one for like 20 bucks and here's one for 250 and you like do the double take and it's like the whole psychology of buying a 250 adapter i'm just throwing these numbers out these are expensive though but you're buying an expensive adapter to put on an under 50 lens it's just doesn't match up but you have to think of it beyond that that this will mount multiple lenses and you do get what you pay for essentially i've found even the photo says i mean they will work i've never had one that was like not aligned correctly or slightly the wrong length i mean i get full focus functionality out of any lens but that is something to be aware of is that you do get what you pay for novaflex is my preferred go-to these days and this is kind of all i buy i do have some photo saves from the old days but kind of replacing them right now let's talk about how i set up the camera now i'm using sony's in this example but this same approach applies to whatever you're using so if you're a canon shooter you're going to be able to do the same stuff by signing custom buttons and setting it up the same way if you're a fujifilm user not it doesn't matter i'm just using this as the example so take notes of what we're doing on here so one thing i will say about sony's though and if you're so sure you know i'm talking about so if you're using voigtlander or zeiss or any of the companies that make manual focus lenses that are native to e-mount in other words this is a voigtlander lens that works directly at e-mount i don't have to adapt it it also passes the exif metadata through into the camera so it will record what lens what aperture the whole thing that's really nice but they also have a feature that by default in sony cameras is just annoying to no end as soon as you turn the focus dial it kicks into what we call manual focus assist which essentially zooms in for critical focus into the middle of the screen this is fine for certain types of photography but i just annoyed beyond believing i can't deal with it because first of all it just distracted me into where am i in the image then i have to move the joystick or the dial around to move that and i'm not even paying attention to my composition anymore and by the time i'm oriented if you're trying to shoot street photography or something of that nature the moment's gone even if you're trying to shoot just candids of relatives or family members it's the moment's over so i set them up a very different way by default i turn that off now manual focus assist is a great functionality and it is great for like landscapes or something where you're set up and you want to check out critical focus or you're doing product photography let's say what i do is i reassign that to one of the top function keys so i can get back to it i turn it off by default but if i press c2 then i can go into critical focus and actually when you go in that way it asks you before it zooms in where do you want to zoom into so it's just a much better way to work so you're probably thinking ted you must have incredible eyes if you can just focus off the screen well a little secret i don't it's called getting older but fortunately there is a remedy for this and it is called focus peaking and what focus peaking allows you to do is when you have this turned on as it adds a layer of highlight and you can change the color i have mine set to white but you can change it to red or green or depending on what your camera supports and this allows me to see the area that's in focus it looks for high contrast areas in the image and allows me to focus in and i this is the fastest way to work because once you get used to this you can dial focus in right on the eyes you can focus in right on whatever it is that you're trying to do in the composition it really doesn't take that much time at all sure it's not as fast as autofocus but it is pretty accurate and it's fast enough and it's fast enough certainly for using manual focus or especially older manual focus lenses so the way i have my camera set up is i use custom function dials to be able to turn things on and off so i already mentioned the first one well the second one won't work right now because i have a manual focus lens already on here but c3 over here on the top left is what i do for my focus selection so if i'm using a g master lens let's say and i'm in auto focus and i want to turn it off that's where i do it i can bounce back and forth between the two so you'll get manual focus or the very different flavors of of autofocus that you have as options the second thing i do is i assign a button for turning peaking on and off and what i do is i use actually it's the control dial on the back and if you know this but on sony cameras there's actually four buttons that you can turn that into so i just have the bottom one so i'm press that once we're going to turn peaking off and then i can turn peaking on and so that's a great way that if i for some reason don't want it then i can turn it off you can bounce back and forth the other option that i like to do and this is a little bit annoying about sony cameras they will do animal iaf and human iaf but not at the same time so i set that toggle to the trash can and so when i hit the trashcan when i'm not in review mode it will toggle back and forth between human and animal iaf so anyway that's how i set my camera but i think it's also important to be consistent so i own several sonys so it's a little bit of a pain but i go set it up this way on every camera that way whatever i'm shooting i can do it quickly and i think that's the name of the game is understanding how to manual focus using level speaking and then also you want to be able to learn how to do it really quick and so consistency is key on this so i mentioned the voigtlander lenses and even the zeiss lokzia lenses which are manual focus they're designed to work with sony cameras well they will pass all the exif communication to the camera so this is aperture information the make and model of the lens if you're using something like this the nikor s f 50 millimeter f4 well this is completely foreign there's no communication happening in here at all you just have basically have a metal tube here it's an adapter that doesn't have any data that passes through it so how do we get this to show up correctly in lightroom or capture one or whatever it is that we're doing well that's what i want to get into next but real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag-and-drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so let's talk about metadata and cro-magnon lenses for just a second so the way that i have lightroom set up that's really important to the way that i work is i need to be able to look at images by lens or by camera model and so the way i set this up in my lightroom catalog is by using smart collections so you set up a smart collection and you give it some metadata criteria to consider and what it'll do is any image in your entire catalog that meets that criteria will sit in that smart collection and so it's really easy and obvious to do by camera model or even by lens and the problem that i have here is that like with an old lens like this nikkor lens there is no metadata the lens make for lens model field is completely blank and so you would think well i'll just go into lightroom and i'll change that data and well guess what for reasons unbeknownst to me that i can't even fathom you can't it's actually something that i would like to ask adobe next time i have the opportunity and there must be a reason because that's actually fairly common most photo editors do not let you access or manipulate or change certain data fields but i just need to change the lens field so the workaround that i found for this is by using an app called exif editor now this is on the mac side of things there probably is a windows equivalent i don't know off the top of my head if any of you do feel free to drop a comment below and share with others but this is what i do so exif editor allows me to go in you can drag and drop and bring in images and you can just change metadata fields in there and so what i do is i create presets and i do them for each lens that i use frequently and so what you do is you do this on import this is very important because if you don't do this on import then it's hard to find these images later so step one is i go ahead i put a card in and i bring images into lightroom and you know you see your recently imported images folder so what i do is i right click on any one of those images and i say show in finder and this opens up a finder window with the images in them then i can drag and drop all of my images i drag and drop them onto exif editor i apply a preset and then i hit save and it's going to go through and it's just going to do nothing but alter the metadata and i only have the one field set up and it's the lens name you got to give it a name and you got to know what it is because then you can create your smart folder in lightroom now the next step you have to do is you have to come back to lightroom and then when you're in that images folder nothing gets applied dynamically so you have to select all of the images that you just brought in you're going to right click you're going to go down to metadata and you're going to go read from file what this is going to do is give you a little warning you'll say hey if you've done any edits they're going to go away and unfortunately that's the case so this is another reason why you want to do it when you import images before you start to edit things but anyway this will go ahead and update all the metadata fields and then you can create your smart collections and then you can have them display there so that is my method of working now this sounds complex but i promise once you have it set up and you have your camera set up the right way with your custom function keys so you can get to things quickly manual focus shooting can be a lot of fun it can be easy to catalog and it makes it just kind of a joy to work with some of these cool older lenses that have a lot of character to them so this is one thing we're going to be doing moving forward and i'm pretty excited about because over the next couple weeks i want to start talking about older lens characteristics how they differ from modern lenses why you would want to shoot with something like this and i can spoil it for you now some of these lenses have some really amazing character to them so i would love to know what you guys think drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"