While this would normally be considered an advantage, it is a potential security problem because old information is never actually deleted from the file.

From the ExifTool documentation on PDF metadata:Īll metadata edits are reversible. Note that this is not always reliable, at least not for PDF files. Deleting all metadataĭelete all metadata (or only the XMP metadata) of all files in the current directory.

Prefix all tags with their general and specific location group like XMP:XMP-dc or EXIF:IFD0, thus also highlighting duplicate tags in different locations ( -G0:1).

Don’t print so-called composite tags which do not really exist in a file but are derived from “real” tags ( -e). Įxtension: Print tag names instead of descriptions like “ColorSpace” instead of “Color Space” ( -s). Include duplicate ( -a) and unknown, even binary tags ( -U). Print all metadata of all files in the current directory. The -d option specifies the date format (which in this case effectively is the file name format), the %%-.2c pattern adds a file counter with minimum width 2 to all files with the same XMP date, the %%e pattern symbolizes the original file name extension. This works by copying the value of the XMP Date tag to the special FileName tag with the < operator. Rename all files in the current directory based on their XMP date. Increment the EXIF date/time of all files in the current directory by six hours. $ exiftool -if '$Make eq 'Jolla'' -FileName -T. $ exiftool -if '$XMP-dc:Description =~ /(Laura|Martin)/' -FileName -T. You can use pattern matching with regular expressions or any other kind of Perl logic expression. List all files in the current directory which contain the strings ‘Laura’ or ‘Martin’ in their XMP Description tag, or all files that were made with a specific camera model. Set the XMP Creator and Rights tags of all files in the current directory to the same value with one single command. Here is a random collection of handy commands. But when it comes to working with lots of files en masse, like shifting the date of all images in a directory by two hours, nothing beats the command line. When editing metadata of single image files I usually use my graphical metadata editor Verso.

Using exiftool