Enhancement: Transfering metadata to other pictures

[stemabu]

For me it would be very useful if there were a way to transfer the metadata (esp. all tags/keywords and geodata) from one picture to another.

[jim-easterbrook]

If you select both pictures then you should see <multiple values> in any data field that's present in one picture but not the other. Right-clicking on the data field opens a context menu where you can choose the value you want all the selected pictures to have.

I've attempted to explain this in the documentation, about half way down the "descriptive metadata" page.

I agree that this is a rather clunky way to do things (especially when you want to copy every part of an address), and a "copy and paste" operation might be more intuitive. I'm not sure how to add this to the current Photini user interface though.

[stemabu]

Thanks for pointing that out. I had overlooked that. But on the one hand, it doesn't work for me with hierarchical keywords, which are very important to me. And on the other hand, it's very cumbersome and time-consuming to have to go through every field to transfer the entries.
I would imagine something like right-clicking on an image and selecting “Copy all metadata” (you could differentiate this with additional entries such as “Copy only keywords” or "Copy only geodata" if you wanted to). And then you could right-click on another image to paste the metadata there (whereby the premium version could offer the option of choosing whether to add to or replace existing data). Any discrepancies in the pictures metadata could then be dealt with subsequently.

[jim-easterbrook]

"Copy all metadata" is a bad idea. You are unlikely to want to copy focal length or aperture or timestamps, and copying image regions is unlikely to be useful. Hierarchical keywords are a problem, which is why there isn't something there to do it already.

One idea I have is to add something like "copy/paste all metadata in this tab", which might work as the tabs are already thematic, so you could copy all "descriptive" stuff in one go, for example.

[stemabu]

OK, I was very vague when I said “all metadata.” I meant descriptive metadata, or IPTC metadata, keywords, author, and address. Certainly not the technical metadata.
Therefore, I think that my idea is not far away from the tab-related metadata transfer you outlined. Such a tab-related transfer option would be a great help in tagging large quantities of similar images.

[jim-easterbrook]

I'll try to get something along those lines done for the next release.

Another thing that you might have overlooked is that if you select multiple images before tagging them, then the same metadata gets written to all the selected images, so you wouldn't need to copy it later.

[stemabu]

I'll try to get something along those lines done for the next release.

Great—that would be really awesome.

Another thing that you might have overlooked is that if you select multiple images before tagging them, then the same metadata gets written to all the selected images, so you wouldn't need to copy it later.

I know the function, I use it, and it is indeed very useful. However, I often find myself wanting to tag similar images at a later date—either because I overlooked them before or because I only received them from friends later on. Both happen surprisingly often.

[jim-easterbrook]

I'm making steady progress with adding copy & paste to many of Photini's grouped widgets. (It's triggered a major rewrite of some parts, but with better reuse of code so they are now more consistent, which is a good thing.)
I'm still working on the documentation, but this is how it looks for keywords: https://photini.readthedocs.io/en/devel/manual/keywords.html#copy-and-paste

[jim-easterbrook]

The copy & paste additions are included in release 2026.3.3. (They are in earlier 2026.3 releases, but weren't working correctly with PySide6.)