Introduction - and a question on Metadata.

[kelvinjouhar]

Hello to everyone - I have just joined the forum, having been a keen reader for a couple of months, since I bought Lightroom 4.

My interest in photography started in the late 1970's when I was a teenager - my father had a darkroom at home, so I used to develop and print in B/W as well as some colour prints from slides, using the Cibachrome process. Photography had always been in our family. My grandfather was a very well known amateur in the 1935-1963 period and exhibited all over the world. Some examples of his work can be seen at http://www.sdjouhar.com My father was very keen, my uncle owned a photographic business in Kingston in the 1960's, and my brother has been a professional photographer for many years now.

Anyway, my interest has been in digital for 10 or 12 years now, but I don't shoot huge amounts. I suppose I have about 10,000 images in my catalog, and they are all JPEG's... it's holiday and family stuff mainly. The other thing is that I inherited a huge archive of 600 exhibition prints (RPS and London Salon) and about 35,000 negatives and medium-format slides from my grandfather. I have been working through that lot for the last 6 or 7 years - scanning where required using an Epson flat-bed and sometimes a Nikon Coolscan slide-scanner. I have also scanned vast amounts of old family pictures and slides, but quite a lot is not yet imported into Lightroom.

On to my question. Is it possible to change the Camera Name on the metadata to something more useful amd memorable .... For example, I have had two different models of Canon over the years, and my daughter (whose pictures I have in my catalog) also had a Canon. It would be good if I could rename the metadata Kelvin Camera_1.... Kelvin Camera_2 and Victoria Camera_1 (if you see what I mean)

Thank you very much for reading this far !

Regards

 

[LouieSherwin]

Hi Kevin,

And welcome to the forum. I thoroughly enjoyed looking through your grandfathers photographs. Thanks for the link.

Regarding changing the camera name, Lightroom it self does not allow this but there is a nice plug-in Capture Time to EXIF. It is primarily intended to update the EXIF date time stamps in scanned image files so that you can use the Lightroom data filters and have the scanned images show up in the correct chronological order.

It basically a front-end for an application called exiftool which is the Swiss Army Knife of photo-metadata editors. Because of this you can edit any of the image metadata including camera, exposure, aperture, etc.. There is an example in the plug-in for exactly how to accomplish this. You need to change the included values to match your requirements and even save them as presets for future use as you scan more negatives.

It was written by John Beardsworth a frequent contributor to this forum.

-louie

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

You also have the option of smart collections and selecting the camera serial number to group images into a collection by camera.

And from there, if you wish, you can assign a keyword to them (the former is ongoing, the latter you have to do yourself).

Not quite the same as a metadata field, but a bit less intrusive to keep the camera field "standard" if that matters to you.

 

[clee01l]

I believe the camera make and model is used by ACR to determine the RAW format of the file. Changing the camera name (make) on the original may make the original RAW file unreadable by LR/ACR and other RAW post processors. As Linwood suggests using the unique S/N for each camera would achieve that filtering that you wish.

 

[kelvinjouhar]

Thank you very much for the replies - I will have a look at these suggestions.
Regards

 

[LouieSherwin]

I believe the camera make and model is used by ACR to determine the RAW format of the file. Changing the camera name (make) on the original may make the original RAW file unreadable by LR/ACR and other RAW post processors. As Linwood suggests using the unique S/N for each camera would achieve that filtering that you wish.

Good point Cletus, I just went back and re-read the original post and see that there are several questions there. I was only thinking about the scanned image files that had no camera name and the scan date.

I agree and would not recommend changing the camera name on any files from a digital camera, especially raw.

-louie

 

[kelvinjouhar]

Ok - having thought about it a bit more, I think I am just going to make use of the colours to signify the different people in my family who have taken the pictures. That seems to be an easy (and visually obvious) way of doing it. Thanks for all suggestions.

Regards