what tags does WinXP pull from?

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottlindner on 2005-05-24 19:58:23-07]

In WinXP the advanced summary properties include Author, Comments, Description, etc. but it doesn't seem to be pulling these from the JPEG comment or EXIF information.  Does anyone know where WinXP is getting this?

Cheers,

Scott

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2005-05-24 23:12:22-07]

ExifTool handles these XP tags.  They appear in the EXIF information (tags 0x9c9b-0x9c9f).

[Archive]

[Originally posted by scottlindner on 2005-05-24 23:37:23-07]

Holy cow, I'm starting to understand this a bit better.  Very complete!

If you don't mind, could you show me an example of the command line to copy the EXIF comment to the XPComment?  I've read and reread your examples but I'm not quite getting it just yet.

So far it all seems to work very well.  Great job!

What's your opinion of the apparent overlap in tags?  My plan is to enter it all in one place, then use a script to copy it to the others to increase portability to other apps.

Thanks for the help.

Scott

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2005-05-25 12:16:17-07]

I must admit, things have become more complex because of the extreme flexibility of exiftool, but I was hoping that the documentation and examples would be easy to follow.  Once you understand the syntax, let me know if there is any way I can improve the documentation to make it easier for others.

First, one minor correction.  The "Comment" tag is not EXIF.  In JPEG files, it is stored in a separate segment all on its own.  The EXIF comment is stored in the "UserComment" or "ImageDescription" tag (which also have corresponding XMP tags of the same names).  This illustrates your observation about the overlap in tags.  Which tag you want to write depends entirely on the software you use to read it.  As you have found, Windows XP uses the XPComment tag.  Most other software uses the Comment tag, but this tag is not available in the TIFF format, so ImageDescription is commonly used for TIFF files.  Of course, ExifTool can read and write them all.

To copy the Comment from one file to XPComment in another file, use this command line:

exiftool -tagsfromfile a.jpg '-comment>xpcomment' b.jpg

This uses the -tagsfromfile option to extract the Comment tag from a.jpg, which is then copied to the XPComment and written to b.jpg.  The same syntax can be used to copy the Comment to the XPComment in the same file, by specifying the same source and target files:

exiftool -tagsfromfile a.jpg '-comment>xpcomment' a.jpg

A current limitation of this syntax when copying tags within the same file is that it can't be applied to more than one file at a time.  However, ExifTool 5.21 (to be released soon) will overcome this limitation by allowing you to use '@' to represent the target file name.  So then you will be able to process a group of files at once:

exiftool -tagsfromfile @ '-comment>xpcomment' *.jpg