Run speed and time taken to generate copies

[knighter_au]

What an amazing tool this is!  I am enjoying beginning to play with it.

I am running the following command (on Windows) to add folder names to EXIF as tags:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -r -m -addtagsfromfile @ "-subject<${directory;s(.*Pictures.*?/)()}" -api listsplit="[ /]" -overwrite_original DIR(adapted from this forum post)

Before adding the tags, EXIFtool seems to create a copy of the image (appended with "_exiftool_tmp") and then deletes it. The size of the tmp file starts at zero and gradually grows to the full size of the file - appearing to be a complete copy.  This is slowing down execution speed on large folders (particularly where files being renamed include video files).

Am I doing something incorrectly to create this behaviour?  Is there anything I can do differently to avoid the creation (and deletion) of copies?

Thanks!!!

[StarGeek]

Am I doing something incorrectly to create this behaviour?  Is there anything I can do differently to avoid the creation (and deletion) of copies?

No, this is how exiftool works. It creates a copy with the new edits, then renames the original copy by adding _original to the name, and renames the new copy to the original name. Unless the -overwrite_original option, where the original is deleted once the creation operation is successful.

[knighter_au]

Understood. Thanks for the quick reply!