Adding comments to EXIF data

mushy · July 23, 2006

Quick question for those in the know... I have begun scanning all my parents old travel photo's to archive them and wish to add all the comments they have put on the back of the photo's. Whats the best way/program to achive this?:scratch :scratch
Any help would be greatly appreciated:thumb

colourbox · July 24, 2006

Technically, you're not going to change the unchangeable camera EXIF data, you're going to annotate the IPTC fields, which are descriptive fields originally set up for photojournalists. These articles I found from Google might be of interest.

Image Asset Management

Meta What?

You'll find that most will use Adobe Bridge, iView Media or Media Pro, BreezeBrowser, ACDSee, or Aperture. Watch out for cheap/free programs that use their own non-standard (non-IPTC) fields which means you can't transfer the data if you change programs.

You might want to study IPTC a bit to see what goes where. For example, put a city name in the City field, not in a keyword field.

mushy · July 24, 2006

Thanks heaps for the quick reply. I will download and give Photo mechanic a trial when I get home.

photobug · July 31, 2006

mushy wrote:

Quick question for those in the know... I have begun scanning all my parents old travel photo's to archive them and wish to add all the comments they have put on the back of the photos?

There's utility software exactly to do this (and in fact, perform all kinds of fancy manipulations of EXIF and IPTC data). It's called "EXIFutil" or "EXIFutils" -- try a Google on either of those terms and it should pop up.

I downloaded a trial version of that software a while back; I haven't had time to play with it but it's supposed to do "everything", and better yet, can do it from a command-line interface (don't have to muck around with a messy GUI interface, and you can run EXIFutils from a script, which you can't do with GUI-based software!).

Adding comments to EXIF data

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