Adding Metadata Speed

[Moisés López García]

Hello. I have to add metadata to more than 50000 Images. Some of them pretty huge, more than 350 GB. each (Uncompressed high resolution tiff). In total I have to add metadata to 6 TB of images.
I am using this command: (paths removed so it's easier to read)
exiftool.EXE -config dcterms.cfg -charset utf8 -csv=metadatatiff.csv  -sep "; " tif .

This works nice, but it's pretty slow. The system is making around 5GB per hour. So the complete process is going to last 50 days at this speed.

I have copies of the files (A copy of the 6TB "only" takes 10 hours in my system) so it's not a problem to overwrite the files.
Is there any parameter to make that exiftool modifies the metadata without copying the files?
I have tried also:
exiftool.EXE -config dcterms.cfg -charset utf8 -csv=metadatatiff.csv  -overwrite_original -sep "; " tif .
but the speed is the same.

The program is generating a warning for each file:
Warning: Error finding parent structure for dctermsDescription - ./VN-27745.tif
Warning: Error finding parent structure for dctermsExtent - ./VN-28005.tif
I think it's not important, because the information inserted is correct, but maybe it could be the reason of the slowness.

Any sugestions?

Thank you very much.
Moises.

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Moises,

I am surprised because I have run speed tests on my system and ExifTool can rewrite files at very close to the same speed as they are copied by the system.

There is no way to do a true in-place edit with ExifTool, so you can't avoid rewriting the entire file.

What type of system are you using?  If you copy the files using "cp" or "copy" is the result much faster then with ExifTool?  Would it be possible to use a metadata sidecar file instead of having to edit these huge files?

I don't think the Warning has anything to do with the slowness.

- Phil

[Moisés López García]

Thank you very much Phil.
I'm using a Synology NAS with a Raid6 configuration, connected by 1GB ethernet.
Now that I know that the speed is unusual for exiftool, I'm going to try to do it in a local disc.
Thank you very much.
I'll post the results of another configurations.

There was One Mistake in ths first message: I said 350 GB photos. Sorry. It's 350 MB. I think it's not really important, but just in case.
Regards.
Moises.

[Moisés López García]

Well. It turns out that my problem is with the Network. Not Exiftool.
I have copy a part of the files to a local disk, and the speed of the metadata adding has improve to more than 200GB /hour.
Copying files is still quick in the Network, some windows related feature must be slowing down the process.

Thank you for your help.
Regards.