Saturday, February 19, 2005, 5:45:04 PM, Michael wrote:
MH> Does anybody of you know a program (or some lines of DOS-Code) to change
MH> file attributes of picture files (like the title or the author of a
MH> picture)?
MH> I often have lots of files with only the exif-information an need to set
MH> some attibutes when giving the files to our image editor. It's boring to
MH> do the same clicks and pastes 50 times. There should be a batch-way to
MH> do this.
I assume from the "editor" and "author" that you mean newspaper
standard ITPC fields? There are some free programs that let you change
IPTC fields in batch mode, ie for a whole batch of images. IrfanView
can do this to, but it's somewhat unintuitive. In the newspaper world,
this is called captioning, am I right - do you mean this?
There are also commercial programs like Photo Mechanic, which are
great for photojournalists or other pros who need to caption a whole
lot of files quickly and efficiently. I tried the trial of the PM and
liked it a lot. PM allows you to caption using many variables and also
templates for diffferent photographers, and is usually the program of
choice in many agencies. Of course there are also others, there is a
whole lot of them. As I said, some of them are even free (but usually
with less refined user interface, which can be a problem for the PJ
who needs to caption the files and send them over cellular to his
agency in minutes after the event.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a command line program which can write
IPTC data, but maybe there are some.
If you do a seach for IPTC & command line, you should come with
something.
Also try IPTC & batch captioning & freeware, or similar searches.
IPTC is the industry standard for embeddding information like caption,
copyright holder, photographer, headline, headline writer, urgency,
location, keywords, categories et cetera in image files. It's the
thing you see when you call up Photoshop's File Info command. And you
are right, editing this for each image alone is a PITA.
I caption all my DSLR images including adding keywords upon copying
them from the card to disk, as it makes it much easier to import them
into a photo database program later.
Good light!
fra
