Be Excellent To Each Other

I've got lots and lots and lots of photographs, and I'd like to encode magic hidden EXIF words through them all.

Does anybody know of a bit of software that'll let me do that? (A bit like Flexible Renamer, except it goes inside the pictures and hits the EXIF)

Edit - I edited the title to CONFUSE AND DISORIENT.

First hit on "exif editor" on google leads to

Here

It says it does batches.

Oooh-hooooh!

I was looking for 'batch exif' on google, and all I found were stuff I had to pay for. This one looks the business.

I was getting ready to write it off for not doing subdirectories and such, but it can! All I need to do is chalk up a queue of changes in the application (a soap) and use the command line app to throw the soap at the directory I want tagged.

It's sufficiently complicated that few people would ever consider using it. YAY.

Thank you!

Like a plonk, I didn't fully research what it is I wanted before I asked for it.

Turns out that I don't need just the EXIF data. What I'm trying to edit is IPTC data, so I can spam a series of images with keywords and then slam these images into gallery2 all at once, and end up with a nicely searchable gallery.

EXIF Editor doesn't do IPTC though... :(

Anybody know of a program that does batch IPTC processing?

Irfanview should do the trick, I used to use it for batch editing EXIF and IPTC info losslessly myself. It's a bit fiddly, but it's free and fairly well supported. Be sure to get the ITPC plugin while you're there. I'd offer more help, but it's been aeons since I done this stuff and I've since managed to forget most of it.

With a little bit of poking, Irfanview has proven to be a useful snazzeroo! Hooray! Thanks, sisternotlazarou.

Irfan is indeed a thing of beauty.

Yep, it's the best alright.

I wouldn't go that far.

It appears to be largely useless considering that most every other function it has is better served by other, more specialised applications. (Which, if you're dealing with that file type on a regular basis, you'll have installed anyway. IF YOU DON'T YOU'RE DAFT AND DIE.)

It would have been right at home on the Amiga, MS-DOS or very early versions of Windows, where a single application that does some basic stuff to a lot of files would be handy. (The Amiga had Multiview/QuickView, a WB 3.0 commodity similar to irfanview. MS-DOS had a bunch of very similar utilities done by a very recurring company that liked to do DOS apps using the early Mac font. (They had an 'interactive-product' maker where you could place buttons and make a basic menu, anybody remember that?) Early Windows didn't have anything, which is where Irfanview came from, I guess.)

But it has the unique ability to look through nested directories and interrogate and replace IPTC data, so hooray again.

No, I'm fairly sure it is the best. But well, the alternatives... yeesh.

It just occured to me yesterday that Irfanview might be useful when you're dealing with computers that ain't yours but belong to somebody DAFT.

Long live Irfanview!