Drag and drop copyright addition

[vanhorn]

Okay, I've got ExifTool and ExifToolGUI running and I've been playing with them for an hour or so with the documentation open in another screen and I can't see that I'm one step closer to my goal than I was yesterday.

I want to add a copyright statement to files along the lines of this:
artwork Alt+0169 by Larkin Jean Van Horn, photo Alt+0169 G. Armour Van Horn

I need to regularly add this to small batches of images (although I have quite an accumulation to deal with now) so I really want to go with a drag and drop solution. I really don't care if it's the command line tool with a horrifically long file name or a shortcut with Target attributes or the GUI, I just want to get this setup once and then drop new files on it as the need arises.

I'm really not stupid, I comfortably maintain Apache and Nginx web servers, Sendmail mail servers, Samba/Netatalk file servers, Windows machines of various versions, and networks of dozens of users with Windows domain controllers, but I simply cannot extract from the docs how to setup this simple task. At least I thought it was a simple task!

Can someone post a complete example of how to do this for the first time?

Van

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Van,

I would suggest a command like this:

exiftool -L -mwg:copyright="artwork © by Larkin Jean Van Horn, photo © G. Armour Van Horn" FILE

Where FILE is the name of the file.  But typing this on the command line could be a pain.  I added the -L option because I am guessing that your command shell probably uses Windows Latin1 encoding.  If so, the copyright symbol won't be encoded properly without this.  There are 3 different ways you can make this drag-and-drop:

1) Change the name of the exiftool application to this:

exiftool(-k -L -mwg:copyright='artwork © by Larkin Jean Van Horn, photo © G. Armour Van Horn').exe

then drop files on the application.

2) Create a Windows shortcut to exiftool, and in the shortcut Target Properties, add these options:

-L -mwg:copyright="artwork © by Larkin Jean Van Horn, photo © G. Armour Van Horn"

then drop files on the shortcut.

3) Create a .BAT file containing this command:

exiftool -L -mwg:copyright="artwork © by Larkin Jean Van Horn, photo © G. Armour Van Horn" %*

then drop files on the .BAT file.  Here the %* passes the names of all dropped files through to exiftool.

- Phil

[vanhorn]

Most excellent, Phil!

I went with plan 2 and it worked first time.

Van