Digital image post processing: Question on adding data to a photo

[popeyespappy]

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

All done! 2036 different images each in NEF, TIF, and JPG formats. About 311 GB total.

The tools I used were Fastone Image Viewer, ExifTool and a spreadsheet. Faststone Image Viewer to batch convert the NEF images to TIF and JPG. It also inserted the metadata for item number and date photographed into the photo during the conversion process. I used the excel concatenate command to build command lines then saved them as batch files to rename everything. Only had to write one command then drag it down the column to create thousands of commands. Then built the commands to edit the EXIF data the same way. Those batch files used the ExifTool to edit the EXIF data to add the inventory information to each photo.

I spent about three days total on it, but a lot of that time was spent debugging Becca's spreadsheet that cross referenced the original photograph filename with the park's object number. Once that was straight it was mostly just waiting on FastStone to do the conversions. The 8144 lines of command line stuff went really fast.