Extracting acdsee categories from IPTC and copying them to XMP keywords field

[Carnolli]

Hi,
sorry for my bad English. I am a newbie here and want to transfer my mass of photos from Acdsee to Apple Photos.
To at least keep the categories attached to each picture I would like to copy them from the acdsee categories field as keywords to the keywords field.
I konow how to copy the content of one field to another.
But how do I get rid of the <Tags> to get and transfer just the text between them?
Thanks in advance!
CARNOLLI

[StarGeek]

Can you give an example of ACDSee tag looks like? Try this command
exiftool -G1 -a -s -Categories file.jpg

Then based upon that, show what the final data should look like.

[Carnolli]

Hi, thanks a lot for your very, very quick answer!

Now it is like:

Code Select Expand

[XMP-acdsee]    Categories                      : <Categories><Category Assigned="1">Technik<Category Assigned="1">Kfz</Category></Category><Category Assigned="1">Astronomie</Category></Categories>
And I would like the following result:

Code Select Expand

[IPTC]          Keywords                        : Technik Kfz Astronomie
So, "just" copying the values between the tags to the IPTC Keywords field with a spacer or a comma inbetween.

[StarGeek]

Try this
exiftool -sep ## "-Keywords<${Categories;my @categories=$_ =~/<Category[^>]*>([^<]*)/g;$_=join('##', @categories);}" /path/to/files/

Example:

Code Select Expand

C:\>exiftool -G1 -a -s -Keywords -Categories y:\!temp\Test4.jpg
[XMP-acdsee]    Categories                      : <Categories><Category Assigned="1">Technik<Category Assigned="1">Kfz</Category></Category><Category Assigned="1">Astronomie</Category></Categories>

C:\>exiftool -P -overwrite_original -sep ## "-Keywords<${Categories;my @categories=$_ =~/<Category[^>]*>([^<]*)/g;$_=join('##', @categories);}" y:\!temp\Test4.jpg
    1 image files updated

C:\>exiftool -G1 -a -s -Keywords -Categories y:\!temp\Test4.jpg
[IPTC]          Keywords                        : Technik, Kfz, Astronomie
[XMP-acdsee]    Categories                      : <Categories><Category Assigned="1">Technik<Category Assigned="1">Kfz</Category></Category><Category Assigned="1">Astronomie</Category></Categories>
Take note that Keywords is a List type tag (see FAQ #17, List-type tags). It is shown as a comma separated string but each element is saved separately from the others.

I would also suggest using Subject instead of Keywords, as Keywords is part of the older outdated IPTC standard and Subject is part of the newer IPTC Core standard.

This command is for Windows CMD. Swap any double/single quotes for Mac/Linux. I can't help you if you insist on using PowerShell.

[Carnolli]

Thank you so much. You really are an expert. And whow - such a quick solution for this complex question!!!

[Carnolli]

Just in case somebody wants to switch from ACDSee for Windows to Apple Fotos like me (I was looking for a solution for a very long time):

After copying the ACDSee categories to the Keywords field like above, I also copied the names of the faces recognized to the Keywords Tag, deleting duplicates which could have resulted of the two actions:

exiftool -r -P -overwrite_original -sep ## "-Keywords+<${ACDSeeRegionName}" -api nodups /path/to/files

Now Apple Fotos can easily read all the information I collected over the times as it evaluates the keywords Tag.

Thanks to you all.