How to clean/edit Metadata: EXIF, IPTC,JFIF, TIFF ?

cayenne

CR Pro
Mar 28, 2012
2,868
796
Hi all,

I've been playing around with Capture One a bit, and imported several images that had been processed from LR into PS, and others from On1 and Affinity Photo....many had been through several applications along the way to the final images...most were TIFF, but some jpgs.

Anyway, before releasing these I looked into many of them with Preview, on OS X and in the Preview's Inspector, I could see a TON of metadata in there, some of it I'd rather either clean off, or alter, etc.

In C1, it seems I can only reach the IPTC data....but nothing in EXIF or the other areas.

I'm about to fire up On1 and see if it can reach those....but thought I"d ask here more in general terms, how do you access, clean/alter the lower level meta data in your images before. you post, publish or sell them?

Thanks in advance,

cayenne
 

StoicalEtcher

CR Pro
Jan 3, 2018
417
360
Yorkshire
Cayenne,

Do you still have access to PS/Adobe Bridge? If so, I would use Bridge to edit/amend the exif data.

Personally, we use a a standard 'publish' template which can be loaded up to shots as required, and then over-writes the existing exif.

If no access to Bridge, then sorry - that's all we use. But interested to hear what others may use or suggest.

HTH

Stoical.
 
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cayenne

CR Pro
Mar 28, 2012
2,868
796
Maybe ExifTool/ExifToolGUI will work for you.

Frank


Thank you to everyone that replied!!

I found the ExifTool. and downloaded that and installed to my Mac, that was pretty simple.

It is a CLI tool, but I've had a lot of experience with Linux sytems and used to command line tools and man pages.

I figured how to use this tool and while I only scratched the surface I found it to be very powerful indeed!!

I was able to open my terminal session, and cd to my directory with my photos in question.

I ran a command similar to:

exiftool -a -G1 -csv . > image_orig_metadata.csv

I opened the resultant file in a spreadsheet tool (numbers in the case of OS X).....and I found the metadata tags on each image I needed to edit.

I did find, with trial and error that simple blanking out fields that had values I wanted to get rid of, did not seem to work for those I just added dummy info, but the others I changed worked just fine.

I saved this back out to a .csv file under a different name, to same directory I was working in.

And then did a command like:

exiftool -csv=image_corrected_metadata.csv .

I know the dot '.' is hard to read here, but on each command that just means "current directory".....

Anyway, this took a bit of trial and effort, but worked like a charm once I figured it out.

You can do a LOT with this tool and I can see with some simple bash scripting, you could set up a really quick and powerful way to set up all metadata on your files to a recipe you want, before sending them out in public.

I may play with this a bit and brush off my bash scripting skills which are extremely rusty currently.

Anyway, give the tool a look....it is open source and I think there are some open source GUI front ends to the tool too.

Thank you!!

cayenne
 
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cayenne

CR Pro
Mar 28, 2012
2,868
796
The authors motto seems to be "If you script it, you probably don't know about the right builtin features", there really is a lot going on inside that tool.
I use it to sort the pictures on the SD card into the right folder: Canon camera + Canon lens -> DPP4 folder, Canon Camera + non-Canon lens -> straight to lightroom. And fixup the lens name in the exif where needed (Sigma 150mm macro).
I had an exception in there for the RP and M6II since LR lacks colour profiles, but I generated those with a colour checker passport, so they can go straight to LR now.


Wow....pretty cool stuff!!

I'd really be interested in seeing some of your commands you use for all that...if you didn't mind posting them?

Thank you in advance!!

C
 
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