On a Linux desktop one thing I miss is the ability to easily add metadata (exif / iptc) to the images I upload to stock photo websites. Adding this metadata makes it much easier to submit the same photo to multiple websites. The ‘File Info’ command in Photoshop does what I want but I haven’t had any luck running this particular dialog via Wine.
So i have taken a look at Exiftool. Exiftool is a command line tool for viewing the metadata of an image and allows editing the tags. It can be installed (on Ubuntu/Debian) with:
apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
To view the metadata for a file:
exiftool ./myimage.jpg
To set the value of a tag:
exiftool -Description='Sunset over Slieve Gullion' ./myimage.jpg
Then use exiftool again to check the value was set i.e.
exiftool ./myimage.jpg
Obviously setting tags one by one could be time-consuming but I reckon I routinely need to amend 13 tags of which there is about 3 values repeated under various tag names:
- Title
- Object Name
- Subject
- Keywords
- Rights
- Copyright
- Copyright Notice
- Creator
- By-line
- Artist
- Description
- Caption-Abstract
- Image Description
So I could start with creating a shell script that asks three questions – Name, Description and Keywords – and use that to build an exiftool command to apply to the image. I’ll start with that and then move on to creating a GUI tool in Python when I get the time.
