Newbie question: Copy from one field to another...

[mjremijan]

This image organization software I purchased a few years ago exports my photo descriptions in the "XP Comment" field.  What I want to do with exiftool is grab the contents of this "XP Comment" field and create/overwrite the "Description" field with the same value.  Since I've never used exiftool before, can a experienced user give me the command line commands to do this?  Seems like it should be pretty simple.  Windows or Linux command line will work fine.

[Phil Harvey]

You will find lots of examples here

But basically your command will look something like this:

exiftool "-Description<xpcomment" FILE

where FILE is the name of one or more image files and/or directories containing images.

The next problem is to determine which description tag you want to write.  The command above will write XMP:Description.  See FAQ number 3 for some tips on determining the proper tag to write.

- Phil

[mjremijan]

The tag I want to write is the tag which comes up as "Description" when I simply execute `exiftool FILE.jpg`

[Phil Harvey]

It is likely this is the right one, but you could extract the tag with the -G1 option to be sure (as per FAQ 3).

- Phil

[Alan Clifford]

mjremijan, will you just be using exiftool to view your description or will you be wanting to use another application to see the description?

Alan

[mjremijan]

I performed a test executing `exiftool "-description<xpcomment" "MVC_005S(rev 0).jpg"` and this worked great.  Thanks!

[mjremijan]

mjremijan, will you just be using exiftool to view your description or will you be wanting to use another application to see the description?

Alan

What I will want to do is export my images the write a simple script to loop through the images and execute the exiftool command to copy from one tag to the other.  Then I'll import them into Lightroom and I'll have all the data in the correct fields for Lightroom to see. I'll have to do this for thousands of images so the idea of copying and pasting descriptions one image at a time was not an option