Note: I haven't done this myself yet, but to my knowledge, PIL only allows to read exif tags but cannot write them. You will probably need gexiv2 or pyexiv2 to write the tags to your thumbnails.
UPDATE: I got curious and tried it myself :D If i got you right, you just want to copy the metadata without further modifications.
This is still crude but seems to work:
import os
import Image
import pyexiv2
fp = '/home/klaus/workspace'
fn = 'img_2380.jpg'
full_path = os.path.join(fp, fn)
print full_path
im = Image.open(full_path)
size = 512, 512
im.thumbnail(size, Image.ANTIALIAS)
im.save('bla.jpg', 'JPEG')
oldmeta = pyexiv2.ImageMetadata(full_path)
oldmeta.read()
# read metadata of the original file
newmeta = pyexiv2.ImageMetadata('bla.jpg')
newmeta.read()
# read metadata of the new file
# yes, there aren't any, but this is crucial!
# you need this class as the target for copying!
oldmeta.copy(newmeta)
newmeta.write()
# don't forget to write the data to the new file
BTW: Thanks for the interesting question!