Notes on exiftool Usage [en]

Most of the image manipulation and media organization applications that I’m using do not have great support for meta data. Sure, they can display and edit relevant meta data. But they’re not great at filtering, bulk-editing, etc.

So I’m using the exiftool CLI to get some of the basic image meta-data straight, before uploading images to this blog.

Setting CC meta-data as Exif tags

This is what I currently use:

exiftool -P -Artist='Arno Nymus' -AttributionURL='https://meeque.de/' -Copyright='This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/' -License='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/' *.jpg

Filtering for Exif tag values

E.g. find all files that have a certain camera manufacturer, and output the artist:

exiftool -if '$make eq "Sony Ericsson"' -Artist *.jpg

Setting Exif tags depending on other tags

E.g. set the Artist tag depending on camera manufacturer:

exiftool -if '$make eq "Sony Ericsson"' -Artist="Arno Nymus" *.jpg

Leave a comment