2010-08-27

Batch-editing EXIF data to add copyrights?

I've recently become more serious about my photographic hobby and it dawned onto me that manually editing each JPEG to add my copyright was entirely the wrong approach. Thus, I was wondering if anybody would know of a Free Software tool that can batch edit the EXIF data in JPEG images? What I'd like to accomplish is simple:

  • Add the string Copyright ©$YEAR Martin-Éric Racine where $YEAR is directly extracted from the original EXIF data's day when the picture was taken.
  • Optionally, produce smaller versions of the source images to an output folder as TFCD samples for my models to take home.

Preferences go for a tool that is already packaged for Debian or Ubuntu but, worst comes, I could package the software myself.

9 comments:

Neelypeel said...

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

Have not tried it, but from a (very) quick look, seems customisable enough to use for batch processing?

Yuriy said...

Digikam can do this.
See: http://scribblesandsnaps.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/using-templates-in-digikam/

~ Yuriy

SEJeff said...

apt-get install imagemagick and then use mogrify to do it:

mogrify --comment

I frequently use:
mogrify --strip on images to upload to the web to strip all exif data and make them smaller.

Hugh M. said...

(lets try this again without the typos)

Exiftool can easily pull the year from the CreateDate tag if you use the -d flag to format the output.
So the command would be something like:

exiftool '-comment<Copyright ${createdate} your text' -d %Y

I tend to like to use it in conjunction with find and xargs to process lots of pictures. Seems a little more efficient.

I'm sure it's either impossible or ridiculously easy to add the copyright symbol.

Hugh M. said...

The filename would of course be the final argument of that exiftool command. I sometimes forget because I use it with xargs so much.

Greg said...

Be sure to check out liblicense (available in Debian and Ubuntu):
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Liblicense

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/liblicense3

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/liblicense3

. said...

The best EXIF batch tool I can recommend is jhead. It can do really neat stuff and is meant for scripts.
-- Rhonda

ludovicc said...

Try Exiv2, packaged for Debian and Ubuntu

EXIF/IPTC metadata manipulation tool

Exiv2 can:
.
* set, add and delete Exif and IPTC metadata of JPEG images
...

Martin-Éric said...

I ended up using Phatch. It's a pretty neat application written in GTK2.