ajft

I've been importing my photos into Adobe Photoshop Album over the last few years, entering titles and tagging the images. The titles go into the images in the EXIF header, but the tags and other information is held in Adobe's proprietary database. I can extract the EXIF:ImageDescription with python or perl, and some of the other image viewers will display it... some, but not all. My latest experiments have been with Google's picasa, or more specifically, the beta version from picasaweb.google.com, which allows geocoding and has various tie-ins with GoogleEarth. Unfortunately it seems that Picasa uses the IPTC:Caption-Abstract as the source of its title, so all the information I've entered via Photoshop Album is ignored.

A few quick searches and then, Phil Harvey's came exiftool to the rescue! Read and write every single possible type of metadata, at least every possible type I'm interested in at the moment.

exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode=AUS *JPG
exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName=Australia *JPG

I'm not really sure what to do with the postcodes (zipcodes), I think I'll put them into IPTC:Sub-Location, at least until someone sends me a nasty-gram telling me the correct field to use.

PSAtools was next (the author no longer maintains it, but I found a copy archived elsewhere. Dump out the Photoshop Album catalogue into CSV and XML text files so I can play with it to my heart's content.