If you want to see all your meta data but do not need to modify it, then take a look at the sister program MacMetaShow, which will display all the meta data in a file, but does not allow modification.

It is driven by Phil Harvey's excellent ExifTool, and uses Sveinbjorn Thordarson's Platypus along with CocoaDialog which are protected by the GNU General Public License, which means this droplet is too.

There are many EXIF tools out there, but I haven't found one that is quick and simple enough that I would actually use it to routinely keyword my photographs. They are generally too clever and complex for my purposes. MacMetaMod is as simple as an be - select and drag a bunch of similar images, then type appropriate keywords into a box. You can find the keyworded files later using Spotlight to search for the keywords.

System requirements :
Mac OS X v10.4 or later

Download :
The droplet is a single Mac OS X application bundle, which you can download as a compressed tar archive from the bottom of this page. Simply download to your desktop and double-click on the tar file to get your droplet, which you can then move anywhere you want.

Usage :
Drag one or more files or folders on to the application.
You will then be prompted to type in some keywords, and you are also given the option to be prompted for a title. If you don't want to change the title, then just enter your keywords and click on the "append" button (or hit the 'return' key). If you want to leave the file untouched, click on "Cancel" or hit the "escape" key.

If you chose to be prompted for a title, another window will appear with an entry box containing the current title of the image. You can then choose to modify this title before selecting one of the options below. The first option is to replace the title in the file with whatever you now have in the input box, and append the keywords previously entered to any keywords that already exist in the file. The second option is to replace the title in the file with whatever you now have in the input box, but to delete current keywords and replace them with your previously entered ones. The third option is to cancel, which will leave the file unchanged, not even adding the keywords that you typed in earlier.

If you only selected one file, a second window will open to show you what the current entries for keywords, title, and author are. You will also be shown if there author and city names have been found in the preferences file. These windows have limited size, so output may be truncated if you have many keywords or a long title.
If you select multiple files, a progress window will appear during processing, and this will also flash up any error messages that come from exiftool.

Advanced features :

• You can set author and city names that will be added to all processed files. In order to do so, double click on the icon, and then choose "Preferences". You will be prompted to enter an author string, and then a city. The author string is used to set the Author, Creator, Artist, Rights, and By-Line tags. The city string sets the Creator City tag, and this is echoed in the author bubble when you rerun MacMetaMod. This option is intended for users who only process their own images - if you sometimes keyword other's images, you might want to not set these strings. If the author or city strings are not set, these tags are not modified in the files, ie you can't set them to nothing by having nothing in your prefs. If you really want to get rid of an existing author tag you could set it to something like "-".

• You can create a series of dedicated droplets with hard-coded keywords, location or title by copying and renaming the droplet to something like MacMetaMod-key_Bahamas,snorkelling.app, after which any dropped file will have the words "Bahamas" and "snorkelling" appended to its keyword list with no prompting. This can make your work flow even faster if you have some common keywords that you use a lot. Instead of "-key", use "-loc" or "-tit" for location or title respectively. Note that the syntax of the filename is "MacMetaMod" "minus" "key" "underscore" "myKeywordList" ".app", and at the moment you can't include spaces in the file name, which limits its use for titles, and compound keywords.

Notes :

• You can drop any type of file, but only valid image files will be modified.
• Valid image formats include JPEG, NEF, CRW, amongst many others (see ExifTool)
• GIF format does not support the keyword tag, so these files are not changed.
• If a directory is selected, all the images inside are processed, but subdirectories are ignored.
• Some punctuation characters may cause the program to abort, but you shouldn't really need them in keywords anyway.
• The original image files are overwritten with the modified version, so be careful. All use is at your own risk.
• The file modification date is not changed, to avoid confusing other programs.
• If you enter a blank title, the original title will be preserved.
• If you are an Adobe Bridge user, you can select your files inside Bridge, and drag them from there to MacMetaMod.

Version history :

v2.0 20-Feb-07
Details here : MacMetaMod v2
v1.8.2 12-Feb-07
Fixed bug whereby the author-city tag wasn't set even if it was given in preferences.
v1.8.1 22-Jan-07
Fixed bug that appeared in v1.8, whereby keywords were sometimes added twice.
v1.8 17-Jan-07
Option to have dedicated droplets with hard-coded keywords, location or title by renaming executable to MacMetaMod-key_MyKeyword.app or MacMetaMod-loc_MyLocation.app or MacMetaMod-tit_MyTitle.app
v1.7 10-Jan-07
Added an optional second prompt window so image title can also be changed.
v1.6 8-Jan-07
No longer changes modification date on target files when adding metadata. This avoids a problem with Adobe Bridge ignoring sidecar files that appear to be older than the image file.
v1.5 14-Nov-06
Added progress bar and status output.
Added option to set Author and City fields that will be added to all processed files.

Download MacMetaMod v1.8.2 (12-Feb-07, 1MB)

For the latest version go to MacMetaMod v2

Mark Harris

Visits :