Processing specific CSV columns only

[Martin Z]

Hi Phil, StarGeek, everyone -- another hopefully quite quick one from me...

Is there an option (i.e. syntax) to get EXIFtool to import/use a CSV file but only process specific columns in it?
Example 1:
- I have a CSV which has 10 column/tags for a set of files (one of which includes CreateDate)
- I want to set the Windows 'modified' and 'created' date to the value stored in the CreateDate column
- However, I don't EXIFtool to process the other columns / change any other metadata values

Example 2:
- I have the same 10-column CSV
- This time lets say I want to update the Category tag for each file with the value stored in the XPKeywords CSV column
- Again however, I don't want to change any other tags (including skipping over CreateDate this time)

Thanks in advance!

[Martin Z]

I may have made an obvious miss on this one. Would you just simply use TAG to do this...

Code Select Expand

EXIFTool -csv=Metadata.csv -TAG FileModifyDate -TAG FileCreateDate .

PS -- Sorry, haven't had any chance to test myself yet (busy with some other scripts and work I need to do, so just trying to collect info ahead of my next "EXIFtool spree"

[StarGeek]

Is there an option (i.e. syntax) to get EXIFtool to import/use a CSV file but only process specific columns in it?

No.  The -csv option is pretty much all or nothing.  Any copying/changing of tags would have to be done in the csv file directly.

Code Select Expand

EXIFTool -csv=Metadata.csv -TAG FileModifyDate -TAG FileCreateDate .

Code Select Expand

C:\>type temp.csv
SourceFile,FileCreateDate,FileModifyDate,Description
y:/!temp/Test4.jpg,2023:04:16 12:00:00-07:00,2022:05:17 12:00:00-07:00,New Description

C:\>exiftool -P -overwrite_original  -csv=temp.csv -TAG FileModifyDate -TAG FileCreateDate y:\!temp\Test4.jpg
Ignored superfluous tag names or invalid options: -TAG ...
No SourceFile 'FileModifyDate' in imported CSV database
No SourceFile 'FileCreateDate' in imported CSV database
    1 image files updated
-TAG is invalid option, and the tag names are treated as filenames, which leads to the no sourcefile warning.

[Martin Z]

Hi StarGeek,

Thanks for getting back to me, and for confirming the situation.

While I totally appreciate that at the moment this is how EXIFtool behaves, I think this would be really useful function to add. I appreciate that you and Phil others may disagree, so have created a separate thread in the bug reports / feature requests area when this can be explored and discussed further.

Thanks again for your help on this one!