Copying XMP to IPTC

[pherro22]

Hi -

Have patience here, I almost posted this on the "newbie" forum.  But here goes:

I would like to move my >5,000 photos from Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) to iPhoto on our new iMac and keep all the tagged data. I've done some research and cannot find any simple way to do this.  I have learned that WLPG stores data in the XMP and that iPhoto will read IPTC tags.  I have also installed the ExifToolGUI and have confirmed where the WLPG tags are stored in my photos (in the XMP).

My tags in WLPG are organized by "Events" ("Christmas '12", Soccer '09", etc) and "Places" ("AZ '09", "Lake", etc).  I also have people tags.

At a minimum, I would like to have these come over as iPhoto keywords.  As a bonus, it would be awesome if the photos tagged with Events would be grouped as iPhoto Events, the photos tagged with Places would come over as iPhoto places (don't think it's going go happen because iPhoto needs long/lat but I'll happily settle for keywords here), the photos tagged with People would come over as iPhoto People.

I've also learned the data in the XMP is stored as "Events/Christmas '12", "Places/Lake".  As a double-bonus, it would be great if the I could drop the "Events/" and simple store the
Christmas '12" in Events in iPhoto.

I'm more than happy to do some trial experimentation.

Can anyone point me to an utility that can do this with >5,000 photos?

Thanks!

[Phil Harvey]

Moving the metadata around is easy once you know the ExifTool tag names.  See FAQ 3 for help with this.  Without a sample, I would only be guessing.

You can use the advanced formatting feature to remove the "Events/", with an argument like this: "-DSTTAG<${SRCTAG;s(Events/)()}"

Where DSTTAG and SRCTAG are the destination and source tag names respectively.

But you have posted in the ExifToolGUI section of the forum.  What I have described is easy on the command line, but I don't know if it is possible with the GUI.

- Phil