Editing EXIF data

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 26, 2024
3 replies
934 views

These days it is very common to use a variety of third party lenses with mirrorless cameras. Typically, the camera does not know what lens is mounted on it, so it does not put out the right lens information in the EXIF data. There are a handful of EXIF editors with varying degrees of usability, but most don't work since they don't edit the data that is considered proprietary to a camera maker. The one utility that is supposed to work is very hard to use.

Can LRC provide the ability to edit in the name of the lens in the EXIF data? Also, I don't know if LRC does this, but it would also be helpful to edit the capture date and time for individual photos, as well as batch edit the capture date and time by providing a time offset, e.g., +9:00 hours.

Thank you for considering this input.

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

https://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/jbeardsworth/jbcapturetimetoexif/index.php?sec=use can help you do this - capture time was irs original purpose, but it can change lens details too.

johnrellis

Legend

"I don't know if LRC does this, but it would also be helpful to edit the capture date and time for individual photos, as well as batch edit the capture date and time by providing a time offset, e.g., +9:00 hours."

See the menu command Metadata > Edit Capture Time.

johnrellis

Legend

If your goal is to record the correct lens name in the EXIF metadata for future reference, the Lenstagger plugin will do that for you.

If your goal is get LR to automatically choose the correct lens profile to do its lens corrections, you can set the default lens profiles for a given camera/lens combination when LR isn't able to choose the correct profile itself due to the lack of metadata. This isn't described in Adobe's online help, but it is thoroughly documented in the Lightroom Classic: The Missing FAQ.

Alternatively, you can define develop presets that enable lens correction with specific lens profiles and then apply the correct preset to a newly imported set of photos. That would be a little faster than after import, going to Lens Correction for a photo, choosing the correct lens profile, and then copying those settings to all the other imported photos.

R

RoyPrasadAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you. Good news, Bad news, and Somewhat Good news.

The Good news is, it works. The UI is primitive and it is a PITA to use, but the bottom line is, I can put it to work and make my edits, so I can output JPEGs with the correct lens information in their EXIF data.

The Bad news is, when I ran this on a couple of hundred files, in addition to modifying the lens data, the process also reset all my photos. I lost several days worth of editing, some quite complex and intricate.

The Somewhat Good News is, the EXIF edits also work on JPEG files. So I created a new catalog in LR called Lens Rename, imported all my JPEGs for this one lens by simply adding them, then running the command. This time, it modified the EXIF for all of them, but the JPEGs remained as I fed them into this catalog. After all the files were modified, I simply removed all these files from the catalog, being careful to not delete them from the disk.

So this gives me a method: for all the files I've already edited and output as JPEGs (thousands of images, some 15-20 different lenses), I can fix the lens info by simply editing the JPEGs and leaving alone the RAW files. Going forward, the way to use this EXIF edit is to make it the very first thing in the workflow and apply it to all the raw images before editing any of them. After that, everything should work well.

Hope that's useful info.

Roy

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