Can't even start - renaming exe does nothing

[tvstatic]

Hey everyone. I am trying to use exiftool to get nearly a decades worth of photos from google photos combined with their metadata. I'm following all the instructions but nothing seems to work and I can't get anything to show up as it should.

First and foremost: I have renamed the exiftool(-k).exe to just exiftool.exe. When I try to drag and drop an image onto it, the command prompt flashes up for a moment and then closes. When I try to open the renamed exe directly or run from the command prompt, I get the same information in the command prompt as I did before I renamed it.

What am I doing wrong? Is there something super basic I am missing? I'd like to thing I'm generally pretty computer savvy but trying to dig into technical stuff is super over my head. I'm so frustrated and on the verge of accepting that I will just have to manually download and rename each file with its taken date so that there is some semblance of organization.

[Phil Harvey]

The -k option keeps the window from closing immediately, so you should keep that if you want to use it as a drag-n-drop app.

But if you want to combine metadata from other files, you should be using it as a command-line app because the command will be complicated.

Generally, the command to do this is:

exiftool -tagsfromfile SOURCEFILE DESTFILE

But you should first familiarize yourself with the metadata in the source and destination files.  For this, the drag-n-drop will be sufficient, and I would suggest naming it "exiftool(-k -s -G1).exe" so you can see the tag names instead of descriptions, and where the metadata is stored.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

I am trying to use exiftool to get nearly a decades worth of photos from google photos combined with their metadata.

Unless you made changes to the data on the Google website and are images directly from the camera
You Do Not Need To Do This

Google does not remove any data from the files. They are exactly the same as when you uploaded them.

If you made changes to the data on Google, then the JSON files will have that data. Other images such as those that were downloaded from social media/text or screen shots never had the data to begin with and Google will have the original file system time stamp, but it will be in UTC, not the original local time stamp.

When I try to drag and drop an image onto it, the command prompt flashes up for a moment and then closes.

This is not a real command prompt. It's a temporary window that is there to display the information of the file dropped on it.

When I try to open the renamed exe directly or run from the command prompt, I get the same information in the command prompt as I did before I renamed it.

What command are you using? Are you using CMD or PowerShell? It is advised to use CMD because PowerShell has obscure quoting rules that are unlike any other shell.