ExifTool Forum

Hello,

I am having trouble using ExifTool. I'm trying to make changes to the tags in JPEG or JPG photos, but I'm facing an issue. When I add a "subject," it only appears in the "keywords" section, and it's placed at the very beginning. And my subject field is empty. How can I fix this?

 exiftool_path = '/usr/bin/exiftool'
   

    title    = "Test title"   
    subject  = "Test subject"
    author   = "Company"
    comment  = "Test comment" 
    rating_val  = 5
    copyright_val = "Company"
    tags = "tag1;tag2;tag3;"
   
    keywords = '; '.join(tags)
    cmd = [
        exiftool_path,
        f'-charset utf8',                 
        f'-Title={title}',                 
        f'-Subject={subject}',     
        f'-XMP:Creator={author}',         
        f'-EXIF:UserComment={comment}',     
        f'-XMP:Description={comment}',     
        f'-Rating={rating_val}',
        f'-Copyright={copyright_val}',
        f'-Keywords={keywords}',
        '-overwrite_original',     
        file_path
    ]

    subprocess.run(cmd, check=True, encoding='utf-8')

Quote from: agent on January 28, 2025, 03:36:53 PMWhen I add a "subject," it only appears in the "keywords" section, and it's placed at the very beginning. And my subject field is empty

I assume you mean that is how it appears in some other program.

The Subject tag is where you place keywords. If you look at the XMP section of the IPTC standard on Keywords (https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata#keywords), you'lls see it says

QuoteXMP Specs : dc:subject [Bag Text <External>]

This is basically FAQ #3 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q3). You're assuming that what name some other program gives to a tag is the actual tag name. Find a file that has the data already in the correct place, use the command in FAQ #3 to list all the data in the file, and look through the output to find your data and see what tag it belongs to.

And in case you are using Windows Properties to look at the data, Windows gives incorrect names to a lot of the tags and will read multiple tags to display the Properties. The Windows Metadata thread (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?msg=32875) has a list of what tags Windows reads to fill each Property.

Note that several of the tags listed start with XP (ie. XPSubject, XPTitle
XPComment...) These tags are basically Windows only and won't be read by programs such as LightRoom or DigiKam. I would recommand instead writing to the XMP tags listed there.