Friday 10 August 2007

iPhoto Keyword Utilities and iPhoto '08 incompatibility

A warning to iPhoto Keyword Utilities users: you will not be able to import/export keywords to your images if you upgrade to iPhoto '08. The main reason for this is that Keyword Assistant does not work with '08 and the author, Ken Ferry, has stated that he no longer plans to maintain it.

I am talking with Ken to see if he can provide me with source code to the portion of Keyword Assistant that my utilities use. In the mean time I'll be looking at other ways to achieve the same result without Ken's software.

12 comments:

Unknown said...

I really look forward to the next update! I really wish iPhoto has IPTC support, but until then, keep up the good work!

David said...

I'm really looking forward to the next update too! Since I am thinking about switching *to* iPhoto for the new Events interface and the tagging part. But I too need IPTC for it to be a viable option, all my photos are tagged and I don't want it to be dependent on the iPhoto db.

Keep up the great work!

nonillion said...

I am in the Apple Store Regents street and not even the geniusus can do it, simply migrating images from Vista to Mac should be easy (with metadata intact)

go for it, not just tags but comments (description) title and author.

Samuel

Unknown said...

Hi!

Any chance to have an update of your utility?

Best regards

David said...

How is this coming along? I am one of surely many very eager users who want to sync our keywords to iptc :)

this is not meant to be a demand just a plea :)

I love your little applet, just want to be able to use it :)

David said...

No update about Ken releasing source yet?

Matthew Flanagan said...

Hi,

I haven't heard back from Ken on releasing his source. However, I do have an alpha quality iPhoto plugin available to perform the same function as the "export to IPTC" applescript. I actually wrote it back when the iPhoto SDK was first released. Let me revisit it and see if it is suitable for release.

Matthew

David said...

Matthew: That sounds great! I have been starting on doing some sort of Python script to read tags from iPhoto and have had plans to integrate that with exiv2. But that doesn't seem to be necessary if the jobs already been done :)

I will probably stop using iPhoto most of the time, it is a bit unreliable in my experience so far.

David said...

Matthew or David, what ever came of either of your intentions for writing an iPhoto EXIF writer?

David said...

Hi David (nice name btw :-) )

I wrote a simple Applescript that calls the exiv2 program, which you can get using DarwinPorts for example.

The code is very simple so I'll just paste it here. To use it, paste it into Script Edit and save it as an AppleScript. This script is written assuming that exiv2 is in /opt/local/bin/ which is where it gets installed by DarwinPorts.

The script takes the tags from the photos in iPhoto that you have selected and writes them out to the actual file. There is no checking if the tag is already in the picture. You can use external tools to fix that kind of stuf later on, like Microsoft Expression or something like that.


tell application "iPhoto"
set P to photo library album
repeat with I from 1 to number of photos in photo library album
log I
set this_item to photo I of P
-- log image filename of this_item as string
set thePath to image path of this_item as string
repeat with kk from 1 to number of keywords of this_item
set this_keyword to name of keyword kk of this_item
log this_keyword
end repeat
set theCmd to "/opt/local/bin/exiv2 -M\"add Iptc.Application2.Keywords String " & this_keyword & "\" " & thePath as Unicode text
-- log theCmd
do shell script theCmd
end repeat

end tell

Unknown said...

I Wrote a java tool that exports IPhoto 08 keywords to original image files. I use it with my library of 60.000 pics.

http://giulianomancini.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...
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