Copy filename to list of keywords

[SlavePunisher]

Hi there,

Since a very long time, I used to keep organized my pictures by renaming them with date and time, original name, and a list of keywords.

Now I would like to use OS X Photos with iCloud. I'm trying to write a command to copy the list of keywords from the filename, to the keyword tag, to be able to retrieve and use the keywords in the Photos app.

I tried this one:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -overwrite_original '-keywords<${filename;s/\.jpg$//i}' -P

I 'works', but it only writes one keyword from the whole filename. I then tried with

Code Select Expand

-sep' ' (space as a keyword separator), but it returns a

Ignored superfluous tag name or invalid option

error.

Is there any way to make separates keywords from a filename like "2004 04 07 - 11h38m36s - DSC_0050 - Voyage France beach sea people" ?

Thanks a lot for your help !

[Phil Harvey]

You need a space after -sep:

exiftool -sep ' ' ...

However, with your example file name you will get the following keywords, which isn't ideal:

2004
04
07
-
11h38m36s
-
DSC_0050
-
Voyage
France
beach
sea
people

- Phil

[SlavePunisher]

Wow !! Many many thanks Phil. I've been working around this command for a while, so it was just a syntax error 

Effectively, it works, but it is not ideal. Would there be a way to avoid certain kind of characters ? Or maybe avoid the 36 first characters ?

[Phil Harvey]

To avoid the first 36 characters (and also remove the last 4 characters of the extension) :

'-keywords<${filename;$_=substr($_,36,-4)}'

But if you wanted to keep the date/time and old filename, you could do this:

'-keywords<${filename;s/\.jpg$//i;s/(\d{4}) (\d{2}) (\d{2})/$1-$2-$3/;s/ - / /g}'


- Phil

[Stephen Marsh]

Another method is to use a regex to only capture the words at the end, but not the filename extension. This may or may not always be after the first 36 characters, so it is probably safer to use a variable pattern rather than a fixed number of characters (presuming that the pattern is consistent of course):

exiftool -sep ' ' -use MWG '-keywords<${filename;s/(^.+-\s)(.+)(\..+$)/$2/}' '2004 04 07 - 11h38m36s - DSC_0050 - Voyage France beach sea people.jpg'

Which would only add the following as keywords:

Voyage;France;beach;sea;people

P.S. You should be safe to use -subject rather than -keywords however you could also play it safe by using -use MWG with -keywords to write to both subject and keywords tags.