Looking for Guidance on Where to Start!

[kevincalori]

Hello,
I am new to this forum community  and very excited to get involved ! I am looking forward to contributing and learning from the community.
Could someone guide  me in the right direction for where to start? Are there any specific threads; resource ;   areas of the forum that you would recommend for a newcomer?
Any  advice on how to get the most out of this forum would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

[wywh]

exiftool main page has info to get started if the eager user initially scrolls that far  . Some user-contributed Documentation entries seem to be non-functional by now I have learned by osmosis.

Start with:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -a -G1 -s -n -api LargeFileSupport=1 -api QuickTimeUTC=1 image.jpg
- Matti

[StarGeek]

At its very basic level, exiftool is simple. To set a tag to a value is
exiftool -TAG=Value /path/to/files/

The trouble is figuring out which of the 27,895 tags that exiftool can read is the TAG you need to use.

They are technical and not the easiest to read, but reading the various specs can help. In the case of images, is the best place to start and often that's as far as you need to go. The EXIF 3.0 standard also a good place to start.

Note that EXIF data is not a generic term, it is a specific subset of all possible metadata. All EXIF data is metadata, but not all metadata is EXIF data. It can be very important to know which is the exact type of metadata you are working with.

When you have a problem, show your work. Tell us the exact command you used and show the exact output. What OS and command line are you using. What is the file type. What works in a JPEG may not work in a PNG and will probably not work in an MP4/Mov. There is nothing more frustrating than someone who simply says "It doesn't work" and we have to spend the next week trying to figure out what command they were trying to use.

The command in FAQ #3 is the most important one to use. The command in @wywh's post is a variation that is more focused on video, as the two -api options used there are more likely needed with videos.  Personally, I would not include the -n (--printConv) option as that will return raw values in cases where you would actually want human-readable text, such as Orientation or ResolutionUnit.

There are two things to learn to unleash the full potential of exiftool: Regular Expressions (RegEx) and Perl. RegEx is used in a lot of matching and substitution commands. Perl is used when what you want to do is much more complex than simply setting a TAG to a value or copying from one TAG to another. Teaching these things is beyond the scope of this forum, but there are lots of websites out there that can help

ChatGPT isn't very good when it comes to exiftool. But it can be very useful in regard to RegEx and Perl. Rather than asking it for a complex exiftool command, ask it how to do something in Perl/Perl RegEx. The only problem after that is properly inserting the results into a exiftool command.