Backing up EXIF data

[simid]

I've Googled all over but can't seem to find an answer (or possibly ask the right question).

Anyone know if and how you can backup all the EXIF data of a JPG and write it to an EXIF tag in the same JPG (something like EXIF Backup)? I'm fiddling with a large number of files and I want to be able to backup and restore the original EXIF data using an EXIF tag (without the need for a sidecar file).

Cheers

[Hayo Baan]

First of all, are you talking only exif or all metadata?

Regardless, exif wouldn't be the place to put it. What perhaps is doable is to create a custom XML tag and use that to store the data. But then you still have to be able to get the data to store into that tag. A way to approach this could be to have exiftool first export all metadata to separate files (use one of the file formats that is able to hold all metadata and can be used to read back) and then to somehow use the content of those files as the content of your new tag. This all isn't going to be straightforward though and will require programming from your end. Personally I'd just stick with proper file backups and/or metadata only files. But that depends on what you want to accomplish with this in the first place, of course.

Hope this helps...

[simid]

Thanks Hayo

That's what I thought. My application is working with thousands of aerial photos. I generally need to adjust the altitude on groups of them (by offsetting by a fixed amount). I was hoping that EXIFTool had a simple method for backing up and restoring EXIF without any additional files. Looks like I'll be playing with writing my own app for it.