Hello ExifTool experts everywhere. I am not a computer expert per se; I usually know enough to make me dangerous! I have a recurring project that I've been doing for years, and as part of that, I extract one type of Photoshop "File Info" metedata, that being the "Description" Box under "Basic" information, from multiple Photoshop files at a time. I've used an old, old version of Portfolio on a 10-year-old MacBook Pro to do it, but the software version is so out of date that the people working for Portfolio (or whatever company authors the program these days) probably would laugh me out of the room if I contacted tech support! And one of these days, that Mac laptop is going to croak, so I'm actually trying to be proactive and find a new and better way before it is an emergency! What I want to do is to extract "Description" metadata from as few as 18 to 20 or as many as 250-275 Photoshop files at a time and get it into an Excel spreadsheet. The old Portfolio program exported this info as a text file (in one column) that I could simply drop into Excel. I am assuming that ExifTool will do the same, I just need, with your help, to put on a "computer guy" hat and make it work. By the way, the current machine is an iMac, 2015 vintage running system 10.10.5. Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer!
First see FAQ 2 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q2) for help determining the tag name for the description, then use this command:
exiftool -TAG -csv DIR > out.csv
where TAG is the name of the tag for the description ("Description" perhaps?), and DIR is the directory with your files.
This command will create an output CSV file that you can import into Excel.
- Phil
Well, Brother Harvey! Maybe you get used to this: THANK YOU! My life just got a whole lot easier; any way I can at least buy you a steak dinner or something? :) :) :) :) :)
...and did I say, "THANK YOU?"
Quote from: jadowo on November 17, 2017, 12:14:12 AM
any way I can at least buy you a steak dinner or something?
There's always the button at the bottom of the main page (https://exiftool.org/index.html#donate).
Great. Glad to help.
On a Mac (in terminal), you can go
exiftool -T -description (any other args) filename |pbcopy
and it will break your EXIF fields into a tab-delimited output, and put it on the system copy buffer. From there, go into Excel, point to cell where you want your data to start, and hit ctrl-v (paste).
Nice tip!
I should mention that ctrl-v puts all of the input into properly aligned cells and rows, and that you skip the klunky CSV import dialog.
exiftool uses dashes for fields where there is no corresponding tag info, so if that is not desired, those will need to be edited out from the spread.
Quote from: ekkidee on December 06, 2017, 08:58:09 AM
exiftool uses dashes for fields where there is no corresponding tag info, so if that is not desired, those will need to be edited out from the spread.
Or you can set the API MissingTagValue option to whatever you want for missing tags. For an empty cell, with ExifTool 10.68 or later you can do this:
exiftool -T -api missingtagvalue^= -description <any other args> FILE | pbcopy- Phil
(gotta love it when I come out with a new feature that comes in handy right away. Before 10.68 you couldn't set an option to an empty string.)