Rebuilding exif data from other photos

[jmspikers]

I'm finally starting to take my digital photos more seriously, and I'm hoping to use the opportunity to learn more about taking photos. Firstly though, I have about 100 photos from a few years back, when, not knowing their true value, I rather foolishly deleted all the exif data.

As I'm now wanting to upload my photos to Flickr, Picasa, etc. I want to try and rebuild as much of this data as possible for completeness sake (a bit like with id3 tags and music) and use it as an opportunity to understand what it all means.

Fortunately, with these photos almost all of my settings were on auto so what I've done is taken a bunch of generic shots, trying to capture a variety of light levels, zoom levels, etc. that match my old photos. I've then used an app to import this data into these old photos. It doesn't import every single bit of information and it probably isn't particularly accurate but it's suitable to get me started. However, is there a better way of doing this?

I'm also just wondering, is there a minimum list of exif data a picture should contain to be useful? Is some data, like some of the stuff the manufacturer adds, junk? Is it worth the hassle of "tidying up" exif data?

Thanks.

[teaking]

I would probably say to rebuild your EXIF data from a practical point of view isnt worth the hassel, I dont want to come across as an idiot though, Its just that unlike ID3 tags which are the same from the same track on the same album and can be identified by scanning music samples and analysing the tracks, pictures are more unique with alot of variables I would only really worry about new shots and try not to strip the data or you could be there all day

[wulf]

I wouldn't try to rebuild the EXIF data on the old photos because you are falsifying the record. The point of EXIF is that it gives accurate information about the settings when a picture was taken. However, with the old photos, you can't be sure you got it right and so these now have potential to mislead you.

That said, the idea of trying to recreate the shot is fine. You will learn a lot from that process and, if you get one that is close to the original, just keep the new photo rather than trying to transplant the data to the old one.

Likewise, I wouldn't bother trying to filter the information. It doesn't take up a lot of space and you never know what you might want to refer to in future.

Wulf