A while ago I started testing Adobe Lightroom to process my photo’s and so far I’m pretty happy with it.
Even though it can handle some Exif metadata changes when exporting, I somehow missed the power of ExifTool and thus I started looking for a way to integrate it. There is somewhere on the internet a plugin, but you’ve got to pay for it so I looked further to find a cheaper way to do it.
And so I wrote myself a little export action script for Windows.
Step 1: find your export action folder
This is rather simple, by default it should be in C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions
However, if you’re a bit special, you can find it back by following the steps:
- Select a picture in your catalog and click the Export button (Library view)
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen that just opened and open the “After Export” dropdown and click on “Go To Export Action Folder Now”
Step 2: Download ExifTool and put the executable in this folder
It’s probably not the best place to store the executable, but this way you’ll also back-up the executable when backing up your settings. It’s best to rename the exiftool(-k).exe file to just exiftool.exe.
Step 3: Create the .bat
Create an empty text file and name it something like mySuperAction.bat (name it like you want, just make sure it’s a .bat and not a .txt).
Past the following code in the .bat file:
@echo off
echo Processing Images
:loop
if not exist %1 exit
if exist %1 call "C:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions\exiftool.exe" -overwrite_original -software=ExifTool %1
shift
goto loop
:endloop
Adapt the call to exiftool to your likings, this example will just overwrite the Software tag with ExifTool. Also don’t forget to update the path to exiftool in the script.
Have fun shopping.
P_W999