Removing alphanumeric after import from flickr

colinpurrington

I've moved about 10,000 photographs over from Flickr and am trying to find a batch way to remove the alphanumerics that were created in the transfer. E.g., look at keywords here:

http://photography.colinpurrington.com/Places/Viet-Nam-and-Thailand-2008/18754166_rjNzdW#1451479222_szjXG7B

I can use the existing tools to replace/add/remove in batch modes, and there is a nice tool to remove numerics...but I can't find a way to get rid of the text/number keywords.

Any ideas?

jfriend

For future use, there's a global preference that can be used to turn off automatic keyword formation from filenames when adding new images. That would have been the ticket here before your import. The only way I know of to do this is gallery by gallery. In the bulk keywording screen, there's a tool to clean up auto keywords, but this has to be done gallery by gallery.

It sure seems like this auto-keyword feature should be off by default because when it messes up like this, it makes a big mess.

colinpurrington

Yea, the "off by default" would have saved me. I'm probably not alone in being clueless when first setting up the site.

I don't see an option in "Edit Keywords and Captions" screen for a gallery to clean up auto keywords. I could certainly Empty all keywords, but that would destroy all the keywords that might have been done piecemeal already. The only option that I can think of is to manually select/delete each and every alphanumeric entry...photo...by...photo. It will take me hundreds of hours to do this, so I've just been avoiding it. Depressing to know that I could have avoided it at the start.

Thanks so much for the reply.

jfriend

colinpurrington wrote: »

Yea, the "off by default" would have saved me. I'm probably not alone in being clueless when first setting up the site.

I don't see an option in "Edit Keywords and Captions" screen for a gallery to clean up auto keywords. I could certainly Empty all keywords, but that would destroy all the keywords that might have been done piecemeal already. The only option that I can think of is to manually select/delete each and every alphanumeric entry...photo...by...photo. It will take me hundreds of hours to do this, so I've just been avoiding it. Depressing to know that I could have avoided it at the start.

Thanks so much for the reply.

In the bulk keyword page, in the quick entry drop-down is a Remove Numeric option that I think is designed to remove any keywords that have numbers in them in case that helps you.

colinpurrington

It removes numbers, but not text/number mixes. I'm screwed.

jfriend

colinpurrington wrote: »

It removes numbers, but not text/number mixes. I'm screwed.

I would suggest sending a note to the help desk via http://help.smugmug.com and describe your plight. They might have some way to help you. Be sure to mention that you migrated a lot of images from Flickr.

rainforest1155

I'm sorry Colin, but we don't have any special tools to selectively remove keywords behind the scenes. Your best bet is to go through by gallery with the "remove numerical keywords" in the bulk keyword tools to at least be able to remove the all numerical keywords you have a lot of as well.
For the alphanumerical keywords I could only suggest posting on the API forum to see if someone might have an idea for a script that could remove those:
http://www.dgrin.com/forumdisplay.php?f=25

Maybe a friend of yours is a programmer and could look into our API to write such a script?

colinpurrington

Thanks, Sebastian. I'll just start doing them one by one. Should finish by 2013 at the rate I'm going.