Adding Lens Info for Vintage Cameras

[kleinmatic]

I could use some wisdom from folks here about whether what I've done, described below, is advisable. I don't know enough about exif to know if I'm doing something like corrupting my photos or something else I'll come to regret later.

OK, here goes: I shoot digital photos using vintage lenses. The camera doesn't know what lens I'm using so the exif data for lens is typically blank. When I import the photos in Lightroom Classic I usually put the lens informtation into Lightroom keywords, but this isn't ideal.

So I wrote a python script that uses exiftool via a shell subprocess to write lens data to raw files before loading them into Lightroom. My script edits the following fields. Lens, LensMake, LensModel, LensSerialNumber, MaxApertureValue, FocalLength, and FocalLengthIn35mmFormat. For instance, for my Super Takumar 55mm lens it writes these values: Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 55 f/1.8, Pentax, Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 55 f/1.8, (snip), 1.8, 55mm, 55mm.

All advice welcome! Is there a better way to do this? Thanks.

[Phil Harvey]

I think the tags you are writing sound good.  Historically Adobe also used XMP-aux:LensID, but I don't know if they still use it.

- Phil