Editing EXIF Information

[mhwarner]

I was in serious need of an easy way to edit the User Comment field in my photos for use as labels in a photo album creation program I have. There have been discussions in the past about the ease (or lack thereof) and the pros and cons of editing EXIF info in files. While IPTC information is pretty much uniform and easily editable in many applications, including Photoshop and presumably Photoshop Elements, PTE and many other applications do not yet support using the IPTC data for text, titles etc. I have been able to edit the UserComment field in Thumbs Plus and Irfanview but the data does not always show up in the programs where I want to make use of it.

I was searching last night for a good (and hopefully free) tool to use for editing the data. I found several shareware options (including the old and mostly out-of-date Exifer) and then I found this freeware tool. It is unforunately a command line tool which is somewhat of a PITA unless you were fond of the old DOS command line manipulations, but there are 2 fairly decent (and also free) GUI interface tools as well. PTE supports both the User Comment and Image Description fields when inserting text in the O&A window and just the User Comment field when editing individual slide comments.

<%MainImg.Exif.Description%>

<%MainImg.Exif.Comment%>

If you are technically savy, you can do some batch editing of EXIF data for a directory full of files as well. For my photo album purposes, this will be a great way to provide image captions without editing hundreds of text objects in the software. For PTE, it's an easy way to add text for titles or captions instead of editing the text box.

Here are the links:

http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

http://freeweb.siol.net/hrastni3/foto/exif/exiftoolgui.htm

http://home.wi.rr.com/dick/ExifAuto.htm

[Rickl]

I was in serious need of an easy way to edit the User Comment field in my photos for use as labels in a photo album creation program I have.

Hi Mary,

I use Idimager for all my metadata editing, but have you looked at PhotoME? http://www.photome.de/

Dick

[sanewcomb]

Mary,

Thanks for the link.

I noticed there was a free utility on the site Dick mentions that claims it will convert IPTC text entries to EXIF format. So this might be an easy solution to those who want to use IPTC comment fields for their regular work, and in one step transfer these to the EXIF field for P2E uses. Have not tried the utility myself.

Steve Newcomb

Tucson, AZ USA

[Rickl]

Mary,

Thanks for the link.

I noticed there was a free utility on the site Dick mentions that claims it will convert IPTC text entries to EXIF format. So this might be an easy solution to those who want to use IPTC comment fields for their regular work, and in one step transfer these to the EXIF field for P2E uses. Have not tried the utility myself.

Steve Newcomb

Tucson, AZ USA

Steve,

Looks like I may have steered you astray here.

PhotoME shows metadata attached to the file. I always thought it could add/edit information to an image file. I generally use it to examine image files after processing them with Idimager my main DAM (Digital Asset Management) program.

After reading your comment, I examined a jpg file that had been downloaded, but not synchronized with Idimager. I was surprised to see I could not edit some of the text fields - like title for example. After synchronizing the image file (adding the keywords, captions and other information in Idimager) PhotoME then showed clearly all the metadata edits I had done, and each field was then available to edit.

It's worth a quick download to look at, but it appears one cannot add information to a jpg file until it has already been modified by a DAM program...

This deserves more study, but I may have led Mary down the wrong path...

By the way, I was not talking about merging iptc data with exif data. AFAIK, adding or editing IPTC data to an image file does migrate to the EXIF??? Don't know for sure.

Dick

[mhwarner]

This deserves more study, but I may have led Mary down the wrong path...

Dick

Thanks anyway Dick. I did take a look again at PhotoME, which I had apparently downloaded at the time I did my original search for editing tools. It does allow editing of some EXIF fields. Unfortunately, "User Comment" and "Image Description" are not editable with PhotoME. So for now, I will stick to the one I found which seems to work just fine.