Using ExifTool for Bulk Operations

Question

I would like to have help please with ExifTool, for the following operations:

1. I have thousands of pictures scattered across dozens of sub-folders. All sub-folders are nested under a single parent folder, though. How do I tell ExifTool to apply the changes on all files?

2. What I would like to do specifically is to "cut" each value under the "Copyright" EXIF tag, and "paste" it to the "UserComment" EXIF tag. I would like to this for all photos at once, and each photo has to keep its respective value (only now under a different tag), of course. Again, not all photos have a value in the "Copyright" field, I assume those will be ignored by the software.

3. Finally, I would ExifTool to erase every possible metadata but the newly created values under the "Comments" tag.

Help and guidelines will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try this command:
exiftool -r -all:all= -tagsfromfile @ "-UserComment<Copyright" <DIR>

-r is the option to recurse into subdirectories
-all:all= will remove all metadata
-TagsFromFile @ copies tags listed after this option from the current file back into the file "-UserComment<Copyright" After the TagsFromFile, it will copy the Copyright but redirect it into the UserComment tag.

Make sure and test it first of course. This command will leave backup files with _original added to the extension. You can prevent this once you make sure that the command is correct by adding -overwrite_original.