Hello, I’m looking through archives and throughout the web to find the answer to my question. How can I copy/paste (or sync) the same metadata (tags, description, etc…) to multiple images? It seems like it should be easy and that I’m missing something very basic, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.
Example: If I import images from the same session, I want to be able to apply the same information to all of the photos. Or, if I have a folder of a prior import, I’d like to be able to do the same.
Thanks in advance for helping a brother out. And again, apologies if I’m missing the obvious.
I have had digiKam (Windows 7 OS) for quite some time and the only metadata I have found a way to change, even on a single image, is the Author and CopyRight.
This may help you out until you can get digiKam figured out.
I have another free program, FastStone, that batch-handles ALL of the metadata with ease.
The way it works in FastStone is to select all the images, right-click, and choose Properties > Details.
Any information that you add or change in Details will affect the entire selected batch.
I have never found FastStone to make a mistake; and, this is so quick and easy that I just gave up on getting it figured out in digiKam; however, I am interested in whatever solution comes up.
I started asking this same question in May 2020, then saw that I had already posted it a year and a half earlier. I would think there’s a way to copy and paste metadata into images using digiKam, but I could be wrong. In the meantime, I’ll check out this FastStone editor.
Thanks Andrius. We might be talking about two different things. I’d like to edit the camera EXIF info: Camera make/model, lens, shutter speed, aperture, etc… There’s a specific place for that. I appreciate your feedback.
But why would you want to edit the EXIF info you mention?
That info is placed there by the camera. And modifying those fields it can actually make your editing more difficult (i.e. camera make/model can be used to select the proper white balance presets, or even input colour space).
You could make a valid case for removing (some of) it in the final images you plan to post or give to clients. But that doesn’t concern a whole session in general.
If it’s just about tags and description fields, I find I can copy info from one image to a group of others by selecting all of the others first, then select the image to copy from, do a minimal edit on the active (last selected) picture (both title and description), set the tags, and hit apply. Not ideal, but it works. And, of course, if I have several images selected, title, description and tags I set are applied to all selected images.
Perhaps a “copy” button next to the “apply” button might be useful in a future version? That button would copy all information from the active (visible) image to selected images.
Digital cameras, yes. But I also shoot film, and increasingly I want to upload those to Flickr with the original images dates and camera information intact. I also shoot my digital camera with older, manual focus lenses, and that information doesn’t show up in the camera. There are a lot of reasons to edit EXIF data.
In looking for a FOSS solution, though, I found a ridiculously simple method to accomplish this in Windows 10. Within a folder, select the images you want to edit. Right click on one image → Properties → Details, and edit information from there. Hit ‘apply’ and it will add that information to all the images. What’s not editable is the aperture value (“F-stop”) in this list. I’ll need to track down how to fix that. So I guess it’s not perfect, and there should be a better way out there to do this.
If you applying similar information to multiple images mostly I would recommend to invest some time and write a script based on either exiftool or exiv2.
It will require some time to figure out the script but you will save time on (not) searching for software.
Thanks Andrius. If I had better coding skills I’d probably be all over that. I probably don’t have the personal capacity to take on something like that, though.
All I saw to download was 32-bit Windows version 0.0.4.1 from September 2010; I went ahead and downloaded that as I did not see anything more recent nor 64-bit.
Great question. I’m really not a coder, but I think it’s open source for anyone who wants to give it a try. If successful, you’d be the hero of both the film and vintage lens communities who use Linux. Given the popularity of older lenses on modern mirrorless cameras these days, that second group of people isn’t insignificant.
I filed a wish to add this functionality to digiKam in future: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421481
Please leave a comment there and subscribe if you have a chance because in future, if there is a volunteer to write such plugin, they will be asking for more details and feedback which I can’t provide because I never write such metadata in scanned images/negatives
Just to follow up on this task, it looks like the devs have taken a look at that feature and have determined that it might not be feasible due to the age and lack of recent support for AnalogExif. However, I added a comment wondering if Phil Harvey’s ExifTool would be possible to integrate into digiKam. It’s my opinion that photographers who shoot traditional film and/or adapt older (vintage) lenses onto their mirrorless cameras would both benefit from an application like this.
