New Lightroom plug-in – CaptureTime to Exif
CaptureTime to Exif is my latest Lightroom 3 plug-in. Essentially it’s an in-Lightroom interface for Exiftool:
- Initially it was for Lightroom users whose catalogue contains scanned images and who wanted to make the scans’ Date Time Original EXIF field correspond to when the pictures were originally taken rather than when they were scanned. But people said they wanted to add the camera model, or the aperture details from their tatty old notebooks….
- So the plug-in also lets you write other EXIF and IPTC information. One idea was to add extra boxes for specific fields, but I could never please everyone – not without a lot of work. I’m also hesitant to make writing EXIF so easy that it’ll attract people who should be kept away from it for their own good, and I reckon those who know about such stuff would appreciate a “bare back” style. So I’ve chosen to add a simple box for you to enter your own Exiftool arguments, whatever you want, at your own risk.
- You can save complicated command line arguments as presets.
- There’s a preview of the command line which can be copied to a batch file and tested in Shell/Terminal. Add the -k option and the Exiftool window will remain open, letting you track down any errors in the command line.
- The plug-in will write directly to TIF, PSD, JPEG, and DNG file formats, but I have disabled the ability to write to proprietary raw formats.
- If you really want to write to proprietary raw formats, the plug-in uses Lightroom’s log feature to generate a batch file which you can quickly edit and run in Shell/Terminal.
- One little touch is the “incremental time stamp” which adds a second to each image in the batch – so later you can sort images by capture time even if the file names don’t help.
Capture Time to Exif will soon be on Photographers Toolbox, but for now you can try it here. It’s important to begin by using Ctrl/CmdS to save any Lightroom metadata back to the files, and after running the plug-in Library > Read Metadata will update the catalogue.
Of course, if it all sounds like mumbo jumbo, then the plug-in won’t be for you and you can happily leave command lines well alone!
Excellent! was looking for something like this for a long time, but could not find it so ended up using .bat files instead (a little mess).
Besides scanned pics, I use exiftool a lot to update data in composite pictures (panos, HDR, etc) based on one of the original photos. for example this is what I will do with a pano (first original in the sequence would be named XXX-Xnn and target file XXX-Xxx)
exiftool -overwrite_original -tagsfromfile “%%5f01.xmp” -Make -Model -SerialNumber -ExposureTime -ApertureValue -Iso -ExposureMode -ExposureBias -ExposureProgram -MeteringMode -DateTimeOriginal -DateTimeDigitalized -FocalLength -Lens -Artist -Copyright -Creator -Location -xmp:City -xmp:State -xmp:Country -CountryCode -JobIdentifier -Headline -Caption -HierarchicalSubject -Subject -Keywords -GPSLatitudeRef -GPSLatitude -GPSLongitudeRef -GPSLongitude “-Instructions<(Metadata extraida de $fileName)" -ext .%Ext% -P -q -q -f %Target%
exiftool -keywords= "-Subject-=fPano" "-Subject+=AutoPano" -ext .%Ext% -P -q -q -f %Target%
exiftool -Subject -keywords -ext .%Ext% -f %Target%
Seems I might now be able to do the same thing within LR… Great!
Tks,
ET
Good – knew someone would like it! It’s released for sale now – it might just take a few days until Photographers Toolbox is updated.
I’m just migrating my film scans from Expressions to Lightroom, so this is perfect! It will save me lots of time. It’s not on the toolbox yet, but I’ll be registering it… Have enjoyed your blog for quite a while, too. Thanks, Charlie
I’ve been hoping someone would create this for some time. I’ve been using EXIFToolGUI for some time now to put the lens names back into files for my old camera that just lists “100-400mm” instead of “EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM”. It was a bit of a pain to flip back and forth because I’d have to take note of the file names in LR and then select the same ones in GUI.
Of course now that you’ve built it, there will be the expectation to add every possible field eventually!
Thanks for the encouragement, Charlie, Jason and Esteban.
There seems to have been a little mis-communication between me and Tim at Photographers Toolbox. He now knows the plug-in is ready for sale, so expect to see it there in the next day or so.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I eventually did add a few more fields, but I’m in no hurry to do so – and it’ll never be every possible one!