Managing Exif Data in Photos

Hi, I have been taking photos for years now and have a collection of about 15000 photos of various trains (I do railroad photography). Anyway, I have always used windows to right click and add location and keywords and stuff to the photo and have windows search that. Is there any program that can unitize this information? Like anything that can make inputing and searching it any easier or even import all of that information into a database?

Also if I could cross that over to a Mac OS X that would be amazing too. I have been using Fusion to run Windows to do these photos...

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks,
Brian

 

Ooh, one of my favorite topics, ExIF data! There are a number of utilities that make using/editing ExIF data easier and allow you to manage your images more effectively.

My personal favorite is a command line app (I'm old-school) called exiftool, written by a gentleman by the name of Phil Harvey, and can be downloaded from here. There are also graphical user interfaces that interact with exiftool. There is a list of ExIF-related resources, including for Mac as well as Win, on Phil Harvey's website here.

Another freeware app that gets a lot of "press" is IrfanView, which can be downloaded from here. I've never used this app, so I can't say anything one way or the other, although I hear that it's pretty decent.

Also, Microsoft has a free app that allows you to edit/manage ExIF data, called Pro Photo Tools 2.

I also believe that you can access ExIF data through Photoshop or Corel Paintshop Pro Photo.

With respect to moving over to a MAC, exiftool will run on OSX (there's an OSX-specific installation package you can download from the website).

 

Ooooo, cool! I assume those will edite the info I need? I put my location and keywords by right clicking and going to 'Properties' and inputting it there. I will take a look though, thank you so much!!!

 

I know that the Microsoft app will edit quite a bit of the ExIF data fields (because I've used it for that purpose before).

Exiftool.exe will most definitely edit all of the public ExIF data, and might even be able to work with some of the manufacturer-specific ExIF data that's saved in addition to the standard data from the format specification. However, at least in its commandline version, it may feel like you're doing it a bit blind.

I haven't worked with Photoshop, but I would imagine that it has the capability of editing the ExIF data.

One thing to keep in mind with apps like Photoshop - unless you tell it specifically to preserve the original ExIF data, it may wipe the original and replace it with its own interpreted version of the ExIF data.

 

Also, Brain, since you're using Windows in a VM, you might want to check out ExifToolGUI... it's a GUI for ExifTool (really?!?) written in AutoHotkey or AutoIt, I think.

 

You are most entirely and sincerely welcome. Your "little" app is a true gem, and I've flogged it so many times (along with proper credit ) I've lost count (and probably annoyed some people by sounding like a broken record). I know there are snazzier apps that'll play with ExIF data, but as far as I can tell, yours reads the greatest number of fields, particularly in the proprietary private fields.