exiftool VS pdf-metadata

If you're doing a pipelined bulk processing pass to add metadata tags after extracting them via Speech to text, or have delimited notes in a text file, or ... etc.

You might find ExifTool useful.

It's pure commandline (with a few third party GUI's IIRC) multiplatform and purpose built to display, edit, add media tags to all sorts of AV files.

https://exiftool.org/

> Any method that I've found to clean them up (exporting the originals, deleting them from the library, and then re-importing the JPEGs only seems easiest) will lose all of the years of metadata that I've built up in the library.

The open source tool osxphotos (https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos) can help with this. You can export the JPEG images while preserving metadata using the thrid-party exiftool utility:

`osxphotos export /path/to/export --has-raw --skip-raw --exiftool`

This exports all images that have a raw pair but skips the raw component then uses exiftool (https://exiftool.org/) to write the metadata (keywords, etc.) to the exported JPEG files. You can then re-import these into photos either by dragging them or by running `osxphotos import /path/to/export/*`

Both the export and import commands have many other options for controlling export directory, etc. `osxphotos help export` or `osxphotos docs` to open docs in browser. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of osxphotos)

Check out exiftool.org

Locationator also comes with an optional CLI that can be used to perform reverse geocoding on images from the command line or perform the reverse geocoding and then write the location data to the file's XMP metadata using exiftool. It also comes with two services for doing the same from the Finder or other apps using the Services menu.

Edit: Nevermind, I got it. I used PyExifTool and installed exiftool from exiftool.org.

May not work as not all camera store the serial number in the EXIF, but if you've got exiftool installed you can try running:

I think TIFF has some unique features that makes it more prone to certain security issues[1] compared to other formats, such as storing absolute file offsets instead of relative offsets. So I am not sure TIFF is a good container format, but many camera raws are TIFF-based for some reason.[2]

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=libtiff

[2] https://exiftool.org/#supported (search for "TIFF-based")

I have struggled with this in the past, and I found the utility called exiftool quite useful.

I wrote this tool a few years ago, after discovering that conventional Python methods did not capture significant portions of the metadata: pdf-metadata. Here's the corresponding SANS white paper.

If you want to look through the source code to find any artifacts indicating potential metadata manipulation, you can use my pdf-metadata utility to extract all of the available Document Information Dictionary and XMP metadata blocks from the PDF.