The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Using exiv2 to Help Manage Your Pictures

Installation

As always, in Ubuntu it’s a piece of cake with sudo apt-get install exiv2.

Adjusting Exif Date/Time

With exiv2, exiv2 ad -a [-]HH[:MM[:SS]] file does the job.

For example, my camera was still on DST when I shot my new year’s fireworks pictures, which made them appear as if they were shot at 1 AM. Thus, I ran the command exiv2 ad -a -1 *.JPG to fix it.

Using a Command File

I use a file named exif-copyright-2010.txt (and another one for 2009 etc.) with just two lines in it, which I apply instantly when grabbing pictures from my camera. This file contains the following lines.

add Exif.Image.Artist	Ascii	"My name"
add Exif.Image.Copyright	Ascii	"Copyright © 2010 My name"

This can be applied using exiv2 -m /somewhere/exif-copyright-2010.txt file. I used to mess about with batch processing in graphical applications — which worked fine — but this is much faster.

Read More

You can read more about all of this on the official website.

2 Comments

  1. […] command line utility for taking care of the metadata of your photos. Find out more with man exiv2, my post highlighting some of my favorite options, and at exiv2’s official […]

    January 7, 2010 @ 23:02Permalink
    Ubuntu/Linux Tips That I Can’t Do Without | The One with the Thoughts of Frans

  2. […] I decided to go with jhead because it has many more features — although last year I decided that exiv2 is superior to jhead in ease of use for most of those […]

    April 24, 2011 @ 11:53Permalink
    Lossless Rotation with jhead and jpegtrans | The One with the Thoughts of Frans

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