Adding Body Serial Numbers to EXIF?

[gkphotography]

Hi, folks--

Total newb here, so my apologies for any ignorance.  First, the preface: I sort all my images, in part, by the serial number of the body on which they were shot, and (when using Adobe Bridge) my Canon G12 comes up with no serial number at all, which really puts a crimp in my organizational process.

I've been using the ExifGUI, but am switching to the command-line tool for more power.  Basically, I'm trying to input the serial number of my Canon G12 into the metadata somewhere (either in the Maker notes or the EXIF, I guess) because the camera doesn't seem to record it.  On my Canon pro body (1Dx), it's recorded under EXIF (listed as "SerialNumber"), so I guess I'd like to do something similar with the G12.

Would love to know how I can go about this.  And bonus points for anyone who can explain why Canon chose not to have the camera write the serial into the meta- in that camera in the first place!

Many thanks,
Greg

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Greg,

You can write to the SerialNumber tag to add a standard EXIF serial number to your image.  From the command line, this looks like:

exiftool -serialnumber="some serial number" FILE

From the GUI, you should be able to do this by adding SerialNumber to the workspace.

Or to set this for all G12 images in a directory (and its sub-directories) from the command line:

exiftool -serialnumber="some serial number" -r -if "$model eq 'Canon PowerShot G12'" DIR

- Phil

[gkphotography]

Thanks, Phil.  I'll give it a whirl.

Happy Holidays!

-Greg