Cross-Posted Question; Eporting-Importing Files.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by amillion on 2008-03-16 04:33:07-07]

Hi, I just started using ExifTool and, I have a few questions about it's functionality. I'm still getting used to the command prompt so I haven't been able to figure out what it can do as quickly as I would like. That said, I'm not looking for someone to take my hand and walk me though anything. I'm in charge of a collection of some 35,000 high quality photographic images. Roughly 1/3 of these images have EXIF and related metadata in-file. The other 2/3 are scanned copies of earlier analog images. Metadata is saved to an Excel database. I am interested in doing two things: 1) Exporting the metadata of the first 1/3 to a plain text file or database file. 2) Importing the metadata for the second 2/3 from the database into the images themselves. Basically, I want to "round out" the information that I have for each respective "set" of my collection. How feasible is this? Please let me know! I'd be very appreciative.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2008-03-17 11:10:27-07]

This is possible, but may require some Perl scripting to do this
with exiftool.  As shipped, you can use exiftool to produce a
tab-delimited file from information in images that you should
be able to import into your database, but the trick is going the
other way around.  Currently, the only text format that exiftool
will accept is a list of command-line arguments.  If you can't
manipulate your database into this format, then you will have
to write a bit of script to read your database file and write the
corresponding information using the Image::ExifTool routines.
This sort of thing is actually quite easy to do if you know a bit
of Perl, but if not then it can be rather difficult.

- Phil