My second-hand Canon camera tagged all my photos with the name of the previous owner. The author name cannot be changed in the camera settings – the camera has to be connected with a mini USB cable to a computer that runs the Canon EOS Utility. I am sure that I have at least one mini USB cable somewhere in my apartment, but I couldn’t find it, so before I surrendered and ordered a new one, I had used this command to remove author info from my photos:

exiftool -By-line= -Artist= -Creator= . -overwrite_original

ExifTool is a Perl program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, video, and PDF metadata. It has been maintained by the same person since 2003.

The Canon EOS Utility can be downloaded from the Canon website, but there’s a catch: you can only download an updater that checks if an older version of the program has already been installed from a CD. I guess that is supposed to suppress the resale of stolen cameras, but I think it’s more likely that the previous owner of my camera just threw the CD away. Even if I had the CD, I would then also have to find a CD drive, another thing that I probably own but don’t know where it might be.

But, as I learned from this YouTube video, the Canon software can be lied to. The video says to add an empty key with the name of the program in the Windows Registry¹. Somehow that works. What else can I trick my computer into believing this way?

After doing all that I also found a link for the EOS Digital Solution Disk Software 29.0A for Windows (for users who cannot use the bundled CD), which is supposed to contain the EOS Utility. I haven’t tested if it works. Either way, the solution with the Registry key seems more fun.