Adding camera and lens information to scans in Lightroom

khh · Jan 7, 2021

Hey folks. I use Lightroom Classic to organize my photos as I have since I got into photography as a serious hobby a number of years ago. In particular, I find Lightroom's features for lokating images based on metadata to be very helpful.

However, my scanned negatives obviously don't contain the information about which camera it was shot with or which lens - or film and aperture for that matter. I would like to input this information somehow so I could easily search for e.g. >**** pictures taken on Canon FTb with Portra 400.

However I cannot find a way for Lightroom to allow me to input this data. Do any of you have some insight on this?

I have a robust cataloging system for my negatives, so once I locate the correct file it's easy to find the corresponding negative.

runswithsizzers · Jan 7, 2021

Negative Lab Pro is a Lightroom plug-in which allows you to input all sorts of data about the analog side of your images. After entering the information about shutter speed, lens, aperture, camera body, film stock, etc. you can then use Lightroom’s search tools to find images based on the analog metadata.

But be aware, NLP is designed to do much more than edit metadata and is priced accordingly - $100(US).

khh · Jan 8, 2021

Thanks. I downloaded the trial version, and it does indeed have everything I need. I figure there's a pretty good chance I'll want to try some digital camera scanning in the future for when I need the highest quality I can achieve at home for my scans, so that might be a piece of software I will want to get anyway.

PhilBurton · Jan 8, 2021

Can anyone comment on AnalogEXIF and others like that out there.

grat · Jan 8, 2021

I've been playing with an app for my phone called "Film Shots", which serves as a film log, and can integrate with lightroom.

See this post for more information: https://www.35mmc.com/06/08/2020/fi...ios-but-with-a-difference-by-oleksii-novikov/

PhilBurton · Jan 9, 2021

grat said:
I've been playing with an app for my phone called "Film Shots", which serves as a film log, and can integrate with lightroom.

See this post for more information: https://www.35mmc.com/06/08/2020/fi...ios-but-with-a-difference-by-oleksii-novikov/

Thanks, but what I am looking for is a way to enter EXIF info, including film, lens, etc., for slides and negatives that I scan and then import into Lightroom. I am OK with entering this analog EXIF outside Lightroom if necessary.

grat · Jan 10, 2021

Included in the article is a plugin for lightroom that takes the data from the smartphone app, and imports it into lightroom.

The plugin is free to use. The JSON file might be a little tedious to generate yourself, but it's just text.

The article also talks about the utility "ExifTool" which is used to actually update the EXIF data in the files.

Alan Edward Klein · Jan 10, 2021

I've never tried scanning from Lightroom. But I believe it's one of its functions. So on LR import, you can set search words to be applied such as Tmax100, etc. Maybe someone else can comment on whether this is possible.

Adrian Bacon · Jan 10, 2021

khh said:
Hey folks. I use Lightroom Classic to organize my photos as I have since I got into photography as a serious hobby a number of years ago. In particular, I find Lightroom's features for lokating images based on metadata to be very helpful.

However, my scanned negatives obviously don't contain the information about which camera it was shot with or which lens - or film and aperture for that matter. I would like to input this information somehow so I could easily search for e.g. >**** pictures taken on Canon FTb with Portra 400.

However I cannot find a way for Lightroom to allow me to input this data. Do any of you have some insight on this?

I have a robust cataloging system for my negatives, so once I locate the correct file it's easy to find the corresponding negative.

Depending on what platform you use, there's a free tool called exiftool that allows you to enter all sorts of metadata into an image file, and it can be scripted, so all you have to do is enter the metadata into the files before importing them into LR and LR will see it. I'm sure there are other options, but in my experience, exiftool is very useful, and very free.

PhilBurton · Jan 12, 2021

Adrian Bacon said:
Depending on what platform you use, there's a free tool called exiftool that allows you to enter all sorts of metadata into an image file, and it can be scripted, so all you have to do is enter the metadata into the files before importing them into LR and LR will see it. I'm sure there are other options, but in my experience, exiftool is very useful, and very free.

EXIFTool is an amazing tool. But, it ain't exactly user-friendly. In any case, I was hoping there is some Lightroom plug-in that supports the most useful bits of information for analog photography, e.g. film type, ASA/ISO, development info, plus allowing lens, shutter speed entry, etc.

dabsond · Jan 13, 2021

I have a couple of Minolta Maxxum 7's with the Minolta Data saver module. I can download all the exif data I want to files in a lot of different formats. I have never been able to get the EXIFTool plugin to work in Lightroom. I have tried several times to get the two to talk but no luck. If anyone has slain this beast successfully, please let me know.

Wallendo · Jan 13, 2021

I just use keywords. I also write the metadata to the files. I have also created smart collections for each lens. It seems to work well.

in addition, when scanning, I include as much data as possible in the file name—> date (YYMMDD) - film type - camera - lens - developer - development time + index. For example, “20210115 Kodak TX400 - Leica IIIc - Olympus 50_1.8 ltm - XTOL 1+1 9m 0001.tiff”. It works well for my needs.

Adrian Bacon · Jan 13, 2021

PhilBurton said:
EXIFTool is an amazing tool. But, it ain't exactly user-friendly. In any case, I was hoping there is some Lightroom plug-in that supports the most useful bits of information for analog photography, e.g. film type, ASA/ISO, development info, plus allowing lens, shutter speed entry, etc.

Here's a snippet of some of what I populate my stuff with. There's more than that, but this is probably what you're looking for. Just fill in what values you want for the fields. You can also do keywords with a pretty simple modification of the string below.

exiftool -Make="" -Model="" -ExposureTime="" -FNumber="" -ISO="" -ShutterSpeedValue="" -ApertureValue="" -FocalLength="" -overwrite_original <file_name>

Adding camera and lens information to scans in Lightroom

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