Changing Thumbnail Preview of JPG

[hanfdidanfti]

Hello there,

while chatting on whatsapp with my phone i recognize that they are some trending pictures where the preview of the picture is mostly a naked nice girl. When you open the picture some monkey or some hairy dude appears. I read that this is because whatsapp takes the exif data, if there is some of it, instead creating a thumbnail. Its very funny and me as a completly unknown terminal or command line macuser wondering how can i easily use exiftool to create some of these pictures with my own jpg. Anybody have a idea? I couldnt find anything because i guess its a silly thing.

[Phil Harvey]

You can embed a different thumbnail in a JPEG image with this command:

exiftool "-thumbnailimage<=thumb.jpg" image.jpg

This will embed a file called "thumb.jpg" as the thumbnail inside "image.jpg".  The thumbnail should be 160x120 pixels.

- Phil

[mlearmonth]

I can't seem to get this to work. I have the following files in the root directory of my E: drive and run the program from there:

exiftool.exe
thumb.jpg
image.jpg

And when I run the command: exiftool "-thumbnailimage<=thumb.jpg" image.jpg
I get the following response in the Exiftool LOG:

======== exiftool
======== image.jpg
    1 image files updated
    1 files weren't updated due to errors
Error: File not found - exiftool
<-END-

What am I doing wrong?

[Hayo Baan]

Are you running this from a GUI? If so, remove exiftool from the command. Phil's command is for using exiftool directly from the command-line, in a GUI you would need to leave off the command-name (exiftool) itself.

[StarGeek]

The error you list shows that exiftool is looking for a file named "exiftool", which doesn't make sense if you're running from the command line.

It does say that an image file has been updated.  Have you checked the image to see if the thumbnail has been updated?

[Mesut]

do this first:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage image.jpg > thumbnail.jpg
after :

Code Select Expand

exiftool "-ThumbnailImage<=thumbnail.jpg" anyimage.jpg up command for windows
or code below (for perl running on windows ) :

Code Select Expand

exiftool.pl "-ThumbnailImage<=popo-2.jpg" askim.jpg

Windows or other software does not show results, My suggestion is to look at the results using the software xnview

Thank you so much to Phil who made this amazing the software.

[PH Edit: Removed quotes from some things that shouldn't have been quoted.]