Generating ACDSee Categories From Other Tags

[James Penner]

Hello,

I have a collection of images that I want to bring into ACDSee. I'm trying to use Exiftool to generate the categories, so when I catalog the files within ACDSee, they're organized automatically.

To do this, I want to write other tags in the image into the ACDSee Categories tag. I feel like I'm part way there, but I'm definitely missing something.

As background, I'm running this through a Windows batch file.

Using

"%ProgramFolder%\exiftool.exe" -overwrite_original -p "%ProgramFolder%\ACDSeeMetadataTemplate.fmt" > "%ProgramFolder%\ACDSeeMetadataTemplate.txt" "%Sourcefolder%"

And an FMT file like this:


<Categories><Category Assigned="0">Places<Category Assigned="0">${Country}<Category Assigned="0">${State}<Category Assigned="0">${City}<Category Assigned="0">${Location}</Category></Category></Category></Category></Category><Category Assigned="0">Albums<Category Assigned="0">${Century}<Category Assigned="0">${Decade}<Category Assigned="0">${Year}</Category></Category></Category></Category></Categories>


I can generate the string I need.

I can then write that string to the Categories tag using

"%ProgramFolder%\exiftool.exe" -overwrite_original "-Categories<=%ProgramFolder%\ACDSeeMetadataTemplate.txt" "%Sourcefolder%"

That works for a single file, but it's a two-step process and doesn't seem to lend itself to batching very well. Is there a better way to accomplish this goal?

Thank you for your time.

[Phil Harvey]

You can use the (implied) -tagsFromFile feature to do this:

"%ProgramFolder%\exiftool.exe" -overwrite_original -@ argfile.txt "%Sourcefolder%"

with this argfile.txt:

-Categories<<Categories><Category Assigned="0">Places<Category Assigned="0">${Country}<Category Assigned="0">${State}<Category Assigned="0">${City}<Category Assigned="0">${Location}</Category></Category></Category></Category></Category><Category Assigned="0">Albums<Category Assigned="0">${Century}<Category Assigned="0">${Decade}<Category Assigned="0">${Year}</Category></Category></Category></Category></Categories>

- Phil

[James Penner]

Thank you, sir!

That's exactly what I was trying to do.

Thanks again for your help.

- James