Hello, Pardon me if this has been addressed already in the forums. I looked but could not find an answer.
I am trying to import keywords into about 500 images using a simple csv file that has only 2 fields (SourceFile & Keywords). I'm having trouble getting multiple keywords to be recognized separately. When I run exiftool, it applies keywords but when I check them out in Bridge or Photoshop, they are just lumped into a single string.
Here is the statement I used in Terminal: exiftool -csv=embed_API.csv . –sep ", " -P -overwrite_original_in_place -r -v2 -use MWG
1) Is this the correct use of -sep? I tried other delimiters and still couldn't get it to work, so I must be doing something incorrect.
2) Does it matter if the keywords field in my csv are qualified with quotes or not? (For example, if I view the csv in Excel, it only shows keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 - but if I open the csv using TextEdit I can see that it is in fact "keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"). Could this be the reason the -sep command isn't working for me? I tried stripping out the quotes and using a different delimiter keyword1|keyword2|keyword3 but that didn't work either.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
It looks to me as if you are doing the right thing. If you could attach a sample csv fle and the exact command you are using I should be able to figure out the problem.
- Phil
Thanks for the response, Phil. Attached is the csv I was using.
My files are on an external drive, so when I open up terminal, I first change the default directory by saying,
cd "/Volumes/Image Library/"
Then, I ran the following statement:
exiftool -csv=embed_API.csv . –sep ", " -P -overwrite_original_in_place -r -v2 -use MWG
Thanks.
This works fine for me to add separate keywords to the image. The only problem is that you need a normal ASCII dash in front of the "sep" option. The command you posted has a funny Unicode dash-like character here instead. But if this was the problem, you should have seen the message "No SourceFile '–sep' in imported CSV database" and "No SourceFile ', ' in imported CSV database".
- Phil
Thank you! Thank you! I retyped the statement in terminal and that seemed to work! I had been copying/pasting the statements I was testing into a Word document and I'm guessing that's where the funny Unicode dash-like character came into existence.
I'm seeing this kind of thing now in my terminal output:
Rewriting IPTC
- IPTC:Keywords = 'Ann, Polar_Star, Sat_Phone, scenery'
+ IPTC:Keywords = 'Ann'
+ IPTC:Keywords = 'Polar_Star'
+ IPTC:Keywords = 'Sat_Phone'
+ IPTC:Keywords = 'scenery'
Best!
Ah. I should have guessed cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word. Another user recently had a similar problem (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,4032.msg18945.html#msg18945).
- Phil