Digital photography & design software forum: batch metadata creation for digital photos

A guy by the name of Phil Harvey has created a program that runs on Windows, Mac and Unix machines called ExifTool. It's a command-line utility that can be called out of batch files with its own batch programming language. It can extract - and can edit the metadata in a large number of types of files, with a heavy emphasis on digital photography files including RAW files. It can do conditional-testing before editing, and make backups of the original unedited versions for safety.

There's also a GUI front-end available to make it easier to work with in interactive mode.

All this stuff is free. Go to:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

to get the lowdown - and the downloads!

I use it to batch edit the distance information in pics taken with my Canon Digital Rebel XTi (called the EOS 400D in Europe) - that model swaps the upper and lower focus distances recorded in the Exif.

With some help from Phil Harvey himself, I made a simple batch file to run through all the pix in a photo shoot and swap those distance values back so that they become intelligible to Adobe's programs (Canon's own programs refuse to see the distance data from this camera either way).

@PROlenick and richteral--thanks, these seem like good possibilities!