Unbelievable ! More Caption Search @##!()*&!

voicelit · April 1, 2008

Ahhhh... what's going on here. So, given up on the Filenames ever becoming keywords automated style... why bother....
I spend a month getting some other software to batch rename the filenames to the iptc caption fields... fine works... auto captioning on upload, search finds each photo...
App, software trial runs out. Get this perl script tool exiftool , author's nice enough to email support, answer questions, for the last couple of days... finally: batch writes all individual filenames to iptc caption fields. Great...
Upload to smugmug .... boing , typical... dippyness... all caption fields are auto filled nicely ... let test the search ..... NO CAN FIND....
If I open up the write caption keyword thing, and just hit save ( don't have to write anything 'cause the caption IS there ) just click save... now, it's findable. OR: bulk write caption keyword: preview, save : all are then findable.
Why's it always something . See, I can keep working around all this... but what is the big weirdness about captions, keywords and searching... just never expected THIS to be such a mystery of the universe.

AHHHH!!! arrgh...

http://dotfur.smugmug.com/gallery/4630409_dmCYV

marty (dotfur)

darryl · April 1, 2008

Hey Marty:

How did you end up batching things with exiftool?

I figured out my script's problem, but if you came up with something (possibly) simpler, I'd love to know what.

I'm sorry to hear that your auto-indexed keywords or captions are still not getting found in search. When I did some testing early on, I found that there was a bit of lag with the keywords getting automatically pulled from IPTC, but eventually they got there.

--Darryl

voicelit · April 2, 2008

How I Batch Write IPTC w. EXIFTOOL
downloaded the executable , renamed it ( or didn't -cant remember) - had lot of touble with it - gave up adding ".exe" - have it as just efixtool(-k) - the "(-k) " just keeps the window open, made shortcut and wrote in "target" window :

C:\Users\cathymarty\Desktop\exiffolder\exiftool(-k).exe -k "-caption-abstract<filename" -overwrite_original

C:\Users\ALL THIS HERE IS DIRECTORY WHATEVER STUFF, WOULD BE DIFFERENT FOR YOU\exiftool(-k).exe -k "-caption-abstract<filename" -overwrite_original

FROM "c\Users " to (-k).exe " is already in the target window when you make shortcut.... I added: -k "-caption-abstract<filename" WITH THE QOUTES.......the extra -k after .exe was just to make sure window opened or stayed open : can't remember .... AND -overwrite_original WAS ADDED LATER.

C:\Users\ALL THIS HERE IS DIRECTORY WHATEVER STUFF, WOULD BE DIFFERENT FOR YOU\exiftool(-k).exe -k "-caption-abstract<filename" -overwrite_original

Just got it all figured out writing back and forth on the EXIFTOOL FORUM with Phil Harvey the amazing inventor of EXIFTOOL . You can follow the whole history of us approaching the solution at

http://www.cpanforum.com/dist/Image-ExifTool

follow all the " Batch write filename to IPTC field " postings posted by voicelit and exiftool.

Who knows what's wrong with SmugMug when it comes to captions, keywords, search. Works if I just go in and click "SAVE" . I bring up the " Bulk Caption, Keyword " thing, and click preview then save. Then they're all findable. People at SMUGMUG or this FORUM seem to just want to cower ( HA! HA! HA! what an image ) about it. They're just hilarious. Here and there , some of the forum people are grown-ups, and help where they can. Out in the world away from smoogmoog , this guy who wrote exiftool is just amazing. Free, and the guy is tireless in his helping goofs like me. I seem to have hit on some real emotional sore point with this filename search caption keyword stuff. Must be some major embarressing weakness in a system that's otherwise pretty good.

Go FOR IT Darryl,

Marty ( dotfur )

Good Luck.

darryl wrote:

Hey Marty:

How did you end up batching things with exiftool?

I figured out my script's problem, but if you came up with something (possibly) simpler, I'd love to know what.

I'm sorry to hear that your auto-indexed keywords or captions are still not getting found in search. When I did some testing early on, I found that there was a bit of lag with the keywords getting automatically pulled from IPTC, but eventually they got there.

--Darryl

pilotdave · April 2, 2008

voicelit wrote:

I seem to have hit on some real emotional sore point with this filename search caption keyword stuff. Must be some major embarressing weakness in a system that's otherwise pretty good.

Hi again. I think it's more like you're trying to use the system for something it wasn't designed for, so it's no surprise you're having trouble.

But anyway, as for this problem, how much time are you giving it between uploading and trying to search? I've experienced a similar problem where keywords take some time to show up. I can individually go in and edit a photo's keywords and hit save, and they show up right away. But occasionally when I edit keywords in bulk, they take a little time before they show up. So maybe all you need to do to solve this problem is to give it some time.

Dave

darryl · April 2, 2008

Hi again. I think it's more like you're trying to use the system for something it wasn't designed for, so it's no surprise you're having trouble.

What's that? Captions and keywords weren't designed so that people could search them? That's news to me.

Anyways though yeah, I think it's a delay thing. Did you check back after a few hours and were the captions/keywords still not there?

Also, I read through that thread on the CPAN site w/ Phil Harvey. He *is* an amazingly patient and helpful man. And clever. Here I was trying to write a standalone Perl script to wrap around his executable, when I could've done it all with a Shortcut. But ooof, I can't find anything about that in the documentation, which is a shame, because it is very powerful.

Thanks for doing all the hard work of troubleshooting and working out the exact command-line with him. Here's what I ultimately came up with. Note that it does require you to install the .ExifTool_config file in the same directory as exiftool.exe. (Also, I cheated, and removed the full path to exiftool.exe so that you could see the full Target. This Shortcut will only work if exiftool.exe and .ExifTool_config are somewhere in your path, like C:\Windows)

darryl · April 2, 2008

Captioned a bunch of photos using the shortcut created above. Uploaded with the Picasa plug-in.

Captions appear to have gotten imported correctly, within 1 hour of upload (sorry, I started the upload then had a meeting): http://gladlee.smugmug.com/gallery/4640198_5uiJg#273931547

Marty, your original request was to have filenames created to keywords, but without some extra logic to split the filename into separate words, I think they would all get added as a single keyword. So I guess captions is the best choice.

pilotdave · April 2, 2008

darryl wrote:

What's that? Captions and keywords weren't designed so that people could search them? That's news to me.

No, I was referring to his project to get filenames to show up in captions.

Dave

darryl · April 3, 2008

pilotdave wrote:

No, I was referring to his project to get filenames to show up in captions.

Well, personally, I don't have the time to do much keywording or captioning of my photos at all. With one boy turning 4 next month and another at 12 weeks, it's all I can do to dump the photos and videos into folders labeled by date-description, like 2008.03.15-PreschoolLibraryFieldTrip

So Marty's gotten into a habit/method of naming photos with the caption -- Mary&Mike.jpg, "noble dog.jpg", etc.

If his organization/captioning/categorization system works for him (and I can see the appeal, since he can just use Windows Search to find a particular image), who am I to tell him it's wrong?

Sure, maybe filenames were never originally intended to serve as photo captions, but with the advent of modern filesystems that actually support some punctuation and spaces in filenames, I can't say that it's necessarily wrong.

Anyways, I'm just happy that we've finally got a workable solution (assuming the captions eventually showed up in the images Marty uploaded). From the perspective of somebody who thought this should be a "quick hack", this has taken far too much work. :-/

darryl · April 5, 2008

Hey, yesterday I wrote a web utility to do convert filenames to captions for albums already uploaded to Phanfare. It wasn't a whole lot of work to make it work for SmugMug too.

(Man, I love APIs that use REST.)

Anyways, check it out:

http://pl251.pairlitesite.com/smugcap/

I don't know why I didn't think of this first. In comparison the Perl method is a little inelegant, except that you get the benefit of having nice IPTC captions in your actual JPG files when you're done.

--Darryl

stuartb · April 5, 2008

are you still having to manually 'save' in Smugmug for them to be found in a search?

darryl · April 5, 2008

stuartb wrote:

are you still having to manually 'save' in Smugmug for them to be found in a search?

I never tested search with my previous methods, but I just tested it now, and it works fine. Of course I made the changes about an hour ago, so if any keyword/captioning indexing needed to take place after the changes, it had lots of time.

stuartb · April 5, 2008

dont know if its any help . .but I find this to be a great tool http://photothumb.com/IPTCExt/

Unbelievable ! More Caption Search @##!()*&!

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