Here is a full example with a standard American copyright notice and no backup file:Įxiftool -overwrite_original -rights='©2012 John Doe, all rights reserved' -CopyrightNotice='©2012 John Doe, all rights reserved' 'file name.extension' Format the copyright notice according to your country: Guide to photo metadata fields / Copyright Notice.To avoid that and modify files directly, use the -overwrite_original option.

ExifTool creates a copy of the original file, appending _original to the file name, as a backup.

Especially when using wildcards, *.jpg is not the same as *.JPG.

Remember that extensions and filenames are case sensitive on Linux.

Here is how to add standard copyright information to a file:Įxiftool -rights='Copyright' -CopyrightNotice='Copyright' 'file name.extension'īatch metadata editing: Replace the file name with a directory name to modify all files in a directory.

The options -EXIF:Copyright and -copyright produce disappointing results in terms of compatibility with standard image managers on Linux. The -CopyrightNotice option also works reliably and populates the ITPC CopyrightNotice field. More details: the -rights option seems to be a shorthand for -XMP-dc:Rights, and definitely a better solution than using the -copyright option, which doesn’t seem to produce readable results by gThumb and Gnome Image Viewer. Add copyright information to image metadata on Linux Copyright Notice and XMP RightsĪfter trying out a lot of metadata tags and testing the results, I recommend using both the -rights and -CopyrightNotice with identical content for copyright information. Metadata information can also be exported to an html document:Įxiftool -h.

Exiftool examples