I’ll expand on that, with some info from experience and from the manual.
- Port metadata from the source photo into a final image (the file formats can differ):
exiftool -writeMode cg -TagsFromFile “source.raw” -all:all “final.jpg”
* You can also save metadata from an image into an XMP file, which you could manually edit in a text editor, and then move it from the XMP file into an image:
exiftool -TagsFromFile source.raw meta.xmp
exiftool -TagsFromFile meta.xmp final.jpg
Or you can use the MIE format instead of XMP, [for reasons](http://search.cpan.org/~exiftool/Image-ExifTool-10.20/lib/Image/ExifTool/MIE.pm#WHAT_IS_MIE?). Just replace "xmp" with "mie" in the two lines above.
* The examples above operate on a single file at a time. This one processes a whole folder, you can use it if the names of your final images match the names of the source images. It recursively rewrites all "JPG" images in "dir" with information copied from the corresponding "CR2" images in the same directories:
exiftool -TagsFromFile %d%f.CR2 -r -ext JPG dir
* Same example as above but different folder structure. If the files you want to get metadata from (e.g. raw files of various formats) are in "`source/*`" and the files you want to write the metadata to are in "`destination/*.jpg`"
exiftool -TagsFromFile @ -srcfile destination/%f.jpg source
It would automatically copy metadata:
source/amsterdam.pef → destination/amsterdam.jpg
source/barcelona.raf → destination/barcelona.jpg
source/chicago.dng → destination/chicago.jpg
* Save metadata in XMP format for each image in "dir":
exiftool -o %d%f.xmp dir