Engineer-Poet's Journal: Editting image metadata in Linux

I've got a problem and I hope you folks can help.

I came back from my little trip with about 1300 images from two different photographers (and several dozen AVI's, which aren't at issue here). The images are all JPEG.

The Windows image/FAX viewer software provides for rather comprehensive addition of metadata to JPEG files, or appears to. There are a number of fields to which one can add data about the image, creator, and such. This is such a great thing, I had planned to annotate every image in order to make the set more useful later.

These plans ran into a brick wall when I got the files copied to my desktop (Mandriva One) PC. The Gimp doesn't seem to admit that JPEG metadata exists. ImageMagick does claim a means of adding comments to images (and it's scriptable, which is a great thing) but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to print those comments or load from/save to a file. It's as if they are write-only.

Questions for the bunch:

1. Do the Windows tools actually put metadata in the JPEG files, or is it a non-standard extension held in other files?
2. If it's in the JPEG itself, what Linux tools should I be looking for to read and edit it conveniently?

EXIF and IPTC metadata

[Randle_Revar]

JPEG has at least two types of metadata called EXIF and IPTC. Exiv2 is a command-line program that can display and edit EXIF and IPTC metadata. DigiKam is a KDE photo management app that can view the metadata and edit it with the appropriate KiPi plugin. It seems that F-Spot (Gnome equivalent of digiKam) can't edit the metadata, although it is a requested feature.

Just what I need!

[Engineer-Poet]

I'm downloading those packages (and ALL the documentation) and hope to have the time and energy to install and play with them soon.