Writing to the AltTextAccessibility field

[jims]

First time user!!

I am trying to write an alt-text description to the AltTextAccessibility field of a jpg image.
From the documentation, it seemed that this syntax should work from the command line:

exiftool -overwrite_original -AltTextAccessibility<train.txt train.jpg

But nothing gets written. I have setup the exiftool folder in the path.
What error am I making?

It's the first step of looking to see if I can use exiftool to do the same for
144 images!!

Jim

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jim,

Close, but try this:

exiftool -overwrite_original "-AltTextAccessibility<=train.txt" train.jpg

(assuming you want to write the contents of the "train.txt" file rather than "train.txt" literally.)

And to write the same tag to a bunch of images, specify a directory name instead of the file name.

- Phil

[jims]

MANY thanks, Phil.

I do need to do the same for all 144 files in that directory, but it's a different alt-text file for each image. I guess it will have to be a powershell script. :-)

[Phil Harvey]

Either that, or create a CSV file with the appropriate entry for each file and use this command:

exiftool -csv=my.csv DIR

To see the exact format required for the input CSV file, use this command on a file that contains this information:

exiftool -csv -AltTextAccessibility train.jpg

- Phil

[jims]

Wow, thanks very much for that. I am slowly working my way more carefully through the documentation, but had not come across that option yet. That will save a lot of time.
Wonderful! :-)
Thanks again,
Jim

[StarGeek]

I do need to do the same for all 144 files in that directory, but it's a different alt-text file for each image.

If the text filename and the image filename are the same except for the extension, as shown in your example, you could do this

exiftool -overwrite_original "-AltTextAccessibility<=%d%f.txt" train.jpg

I guess it will have to be a powershell script. :-)

Your rarely should look to writing a script with exiftool, as the startup time is the biggest performance hit. See Common Mistake #3, "Over-scripting". For example, in this post, they were using a looping script and it took 10 minutes. After changing so that exiftool was only run once, it took 30 seconds.