Lightroom Plugin Offers and Easy Way to Add EXIF Data for Manual Lenses

Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don’t recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there’s an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.

LensTagger, a plugin created by Dirk, lets you edit and add information like aperture and focal length for any manual lens, as well as program your own presets for the lenses you use most often. The presets part will require that you have ExifTool installed, but there’s none of the command line headache because the plugin does all of the heavy lifting for you.

If you’re interested you can find LensTagger along with a more detailed explanation of how it works here. It’s worth noting that there are other EXIF editing tools out there; programs like PowerExif allow you to change all of the EXIF data and some others even let you do some basic photo editing. But these programs cost money and are rarely compatible with Mac unless you use a virtual machine.

If you use Lightroom, LensTagger is an easy-to-use alternative that, most importantly, is free.

Adding foreign Lens Info in Lightroom [Dirk Essl]


Image credit: Hanimex 75-300 mm macro lens by Colin-47

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