Aperture users: Are you using Metadata Presets? If not, you should consider it - they’re really handy for entering metadata on large numbers of images, particularly at the point of import. I have one fairly generic preset that just has my copyright info, country, and name, which I use for everyday shooting, and come up with others depending on the shoot (travel, events, etc). What I realized when the new year rolled around was that my copyright still said “©2009 Simon Abrams. All Rights Reserved.”, and that I had no easy way of changing it, due to Aperture’s woefully spartan interface for managing or editing metadata presets. In Aperture’s current incarnation, all you can do is add, rename or delete a preset; you can’t edit any of the text within it.
So what to do? Well, a little poking around in the Application Support folder (specifically ~/Library/Application Support/Aperture) reveals that Aperture’s metadata presets are (quasi-)conveniently contained in an XML document. Simply opening up the file in your text editor of choice enables you to make changes to the metadata content, save it, and voila, you’re in business. Of course, ideally, you’d be able to make these simple edits in Aperture itself - maybe we can add this to our wishlist for (the increasingly vaporware-ish) Aperture 3.