How should linebreaks and tabs be typed to movie Keys:Description?
I can paste from a BBEdit text-only (styled text from LibreOffice works the same) the following to the macOS 13.2 Terminal with exiftool 12.50:
exiftool -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='One line break:
Two line breaks:
Umlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot .
Tabs between words' movie.mp4
...it is displayed in the Terminal as:
exiftool -a -G1 -s movie.mp4
[Keys] Description : One line break:.Two line breaks:..Umlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot ..Tabs.between.words
...or more properly as:
exiftool -a -G1 -s -b -Keys:Description movie.mp4
One line break:
Two line breaks:
Umlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot .
Tabs between words
...macOS 13 Ventura QuickTime Player and Photos.app display them correctly in their original form and they can be correctly copied elsewhere.
-> Question: How should I type the command?
This does not work because the control characters are displayed as \n and \t in QuickTime Player and Photos.app. Using \\n or ${\} or ${/}gives a similar unwanted result:
exiftool -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='One line break:\nTwo line breaks:\n\nUmlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot .\nTabs\tbetween\twords' movie.mp4
[Keys] Description : One line break:\nTwo line breaks:\n\nUmlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot .\nTabs\tbetween\twords%
- Matti
Hi Matti,
FAQ 21 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q21) explains this in detail.
- Phil
Thanks! All these work in macOS 13 Ventura for linebreaks:
exiftool -ec -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='line 1\nline 2' movie.mp4
exiftool -E -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='line 1
line 2' movie.mp4
exiftool -fast3 -overwrite_original '-Keys:Description<line 1$/line 2' movie.mp4
This seems to be the easiest option for linebreaks and tabs:
exiftool -ec -overwrite_original -Keys:Description='One line break:\nTwo line breaks:\n\nUmlauts åäöÅÄÖ and a dot .\nTabs\tbetween\twords' movie.mp4
p.s. I usually use -overwrite_original_in_place so some macOS specific attributes are preserved. -overwrite_original might be just as good because it (surprisingly?) preserves Finder color tags and I do not care about other more obscure tags like "Hide extension".
- Matti
I am surprised that any finder tags would be preserved with -overwrite_original. But then again, the MacOS filesystem is mysterious. :(
- Phil