Allow EXIF changes to Camera Maker and Camera Model fields

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The EXIF and IPTC metadata controls in Lr do not allow access to Camera Maker and Camera Model fields - but I am able to search and filter photos based on these two fields.

I request that Adobe allow access and changes to these two fields from within Lr.

When is this useful? Here are a few personal scenarios:
- I scanned X amount of photos/film from the pre-digital age and the photos are stored as "Unknown Camera" or by the name of the scanner. If I know what film camera I entered, I'd rather use that.

- I import photos from some external digital source which originally stripped part/all of the EXIF/IPTC metadata. Once again the photos are listed as Unknown Camera. I can fill this in myself.

- I edited a copy of a photo in Photoshop and that edit shows up as Unknown Camera. Once again I can fix this myself. This was more a problem in the past before I had Lightroom. Copying and editing a photo outside of Lightroom caused a loss of metadata. Today, initiating a Ps edit from within Lr preserves the metadata on the new copy.

Currently, I'm forced to open each photo in Explorer/Finder and manually edit the file, then tell Lr to read metadata from the file. This is a very long and time consuming task to perform for large amounts of scanned photos/films. Or I am forced to use EXIFTool, but this also does not allow me to mass-edit large amounts of photos from the same source.

Thank you.
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Eugene Master

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Posted 5 years ago

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5 years ago
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Rob Cole

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So, if you, in Lightroom:
* save (xmp) metadata.
* change camera make/model (using exiftool, for example),
* read (xmp) metadata.
then there is no loss of metadata, right?

Using exiftool, you can modify multiple files at once, if you know how.

But another option is to use:
* 'ExifWrite' feature of ExifMeta plugin.
* 'ExifTool - Read and Write' script (not a plugin) in MiscScripts distribution.

Both of which have "multi-photo'ing" built in.. - they're free and I wrote them.

Rob
2014-08-10T02:29:07+00:00
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Eugene Master

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I will definitely check out your programs! I should be a little more clear about what I mean with mass-exif changes. The photos in my collection with missing data are not all consolidated to one folder. They're all over my collection which is sorted by capture date, and I currently have 22k photos. So individually opening each one in the folder browser is what's time consuming. I suppose I could export all of them as a catalog, edit them with a tool, then re-import and redistribute by date again. Regardless, that's still a complicated process which is why I feel allowing access to these fields from within LR would be most optimal.

Anyway, thank you again!
5 years ago
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Rob Cole

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You're welcome Eugene.

And, I understand that your request is for native functionality, and I agree it would be useful.

But in the mean time, it's fairly easy to remedy using one of the tools mentioned.

I mean, if you can figure out how to round up all the photos that need fixing, and divide them by which camera make/model you want applied (you're going to have to do that even if functionality was native) - consider a smart collection, or regular collections, then you can fix them all at once, or by group anyway..
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