Syncing Metadata to multiple photos

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.

Try selecting images and pressing Ctrl + Shift + M.
See if the tags you are interested are editable there.

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https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/tool-metadataeditor.html

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It is, but it doesn’t apply the data to all of the images. Just the first one selected.

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.

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There is a wish about copying metadata functionality on bugs.kde.org. Please add your input in there if you think it is valuable.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155384

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.

Bingo. I found a great tool for doing just this, and it’s pretty intuitive. It’s called Analog EXIF. I had my files changed on my first try.

THANK YOU ! ! !

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.

Seems interesting. I wonder why it is Windows only. Do you think it will be hard to re-write it for cross platform?

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

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I will do that; thanks for the suggestion.

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.

ExifTool is perl, digikam uses exiv2 given thats c++ and so is digikam. If this is about the lack of support for writing certain exif fields, that’s something to be reported/added to exiv2. However if it’s about copying certain exif fields from one image to another that’s just a missing feature in digikam, aka what’s required is implementing the UI and wiring that with existing code to write metadata. I think that specific request has already been reported before. If it’s change the metadata for multiple images at once, that’s definitely been reported before: Again, just a question of finding someone to put in the work to implement it. And there may already be workarounds using metadata templates or maybe even the batch editing tool - there have been lots of extensions there, I am not up to speed with those capabilities.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been reported before, I’ve seen the question come up in different places.

Whoa, this is really happening.

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Yeah, these guys are awesome

I only saw the transformation of digiKam from version 4.12 until now but even then the application improved so much you can’t even compare them. digiKam will keep improving for sure. Once you are more familiar with digiKam please consider helping by answering other users’ questions here and on digikam-users mailing list (http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/) so the developers can focus on writing the code.

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