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Lens tagging from EXIF
bokehlover71
Registered Users Posts: 156 Major grins
Is there a way to make keywords about the lens and camera used, from the picture's EXIF data? I know SM already "knows" it, because we can refine the search results from this info.
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Postprocessing tools have various automated metadata handling, but it depends on what you use. E.g. Photo Mechanic has tons of options for scripting, lightroom has a lot of 3rd party plugins that might do it (and you can manually do it by selecting all of a lens, then adding a keyword to them, but that won't keep it updated for new ones), there are scripting tools like EXIFTOOL that might do it with some shell scripts. I don't know of anything out of the box that just magically does it, however.
I can easily tag my photos in Lightroom and sync to SM with the LR plugin that I already use. The problem is that most of my SM photos already have been tagged on the web, with keywords and titles that I don't have in LR. So a sync will delete all keywords and titles that already are on the web.
I think I found a solution: First I use the Smug Syncback plugin to download all titles, captions and keywords from SM to LR. Then I can filter and add all the camera and lens keywords in LR and finally sync up to SM again with the regular SM-LR plugin.
Yes, I was going to mention that but thought that the author would jump back in with details.
I'm personally very leary of it, as I worry it may sync something into Lightroom I do not want there, but then again I try really, really hard never to change any metadata on Smugmug, especially since some aspects (dates especially) are handled inconsistently. But it sounds like it may be a good solution in your case.
I do not know if it matters to you, but be aware that changing metadata in lightroom, which causes it to publish, does NOT transfer the image back up with new metadata. It only sets Smugmug's metadata. Thus if someone downloads your image later, the metadata you put in lightroom does not end up in the image. To make that happen you have to first publish the metadata changes, and then mark the images for re-publish. This then sends a new image with metadata inside the image, so downloads will include it. This feature allows for really, really fast publishing of metadata only changes, and does not affect what people see, but does affect downloads.
It wasn't quite that easy … Because the Smug Syncback didn't find all the photos on SM. Lots of them were missing. So when I upload the new keywords from LR, many of the old titles and keywords are gone.
I found the problem – and a solution! It seems that Smug Syncback only can sync albums containing up to 99 photos. Several of my albums were larger than that. But now I have split them up in several smaller albums, and everything works perfect!
That's really odd, I wonder if that's a known issue. If it's not documented as a limitation, you might ask the help desk.
I just contacted the plugin author, and he wasn't even aware of it. He would check it out when he had time for it.