Bulk transfer EXIF info from photos to the Apple Comments Field

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Hello and thank you for creating this resource Phil. Thanks to Apple not allowing us (as of today), to sort files by the time and date they were captured in camera, is there a way to pick up that info and paste it into a field that will allow it to display in the Apple Comments field?

Ideally, I'd like to do this from inside Lightroom, but inside the Finder with an applescript and/or ExifTool would be fine. For example, 20180814_1500.jpg would be a file created on Aug 14, 2018 at 3:00pm, and if I had those lined up, I could view files by date captured. I don't think I could do this with RAW files though if I don't want to allow any edits to their metadata, but feel free to comment. Thank you for any help!

-Andrew

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Andrew,

You can easily copy any tag to any other tag with ExifTool.  The trick will be to figure out what you want.

For example, to copy date captured to the Finder comment, this would be the command:

exiftool "-MDItemFinderComment<DateTimeOriginal" DIR

To see all available tags, do this:

exiftool -api requestall=2 -a -G1 FILE

Note that I have had to invoke the RequestAll API option to extract the MacOS (Finder) information because it isn't extracted by default.

You can set any of the writable MacOS or System tags without actually modifying the file.

- Phil