Rewrite XP Keywords with Exiftool & Python

[schaakspeler]

I have the following script that takes a word from the filename and adds it as a keyword to the image metadata. It works, but there are two issues:

• For each image a new JPG_ORIGINAL file is created. Why does this happen and how do I prevent this from happening?
• The new keyword is added at the back of all of the existing keywords, even though I insert it as the first item in my array. The order of keywords is important for my use case and I want it at the start.

Code Select Expand

import os
import iptcinfo3
import subprocess

folder_path = r"C:\Users\Maryse\Documents\testimg"
exiftool_path = r"C:\Program Files\ExifTool\ExifTool.exe"

for filename in os.listdir(folder_path):
    image_path = os.path.join(folder_path, filename)

    info = iptcinfo3.IPTCInfo(image_path)
    print("info: ", info)
    keywords = info['keywords']

    # Convert the byte strings to regular strings
    keywords = [keyword.decode('utf-8') for keyword in keywords]

    parts = image_path.split("_")
    first = parts[2].capitalize()

    keywords.insert(0, first)
    print("keywords: ", keywords)

    subprocess.run([exiftool_path, '-XPKeywords=' + ', '.join(keywords), image_path])

[StarGeek]

For each image a new JPG_ORIGINAL file is created. Why does this happen and how do I prevent this from happening?

From the Docs:
    By default the original files are preserved with _original appended to their names -- be sure to verify that the new files are OK before erasing the originals.

You can suppress the creation of backup files by adding the -overwrite_original option.

The new keyword is added at the back of all of the existing keywords, even though I insert it as the first item in my array.

Are you using exiftool to check this or something else?  Use the command in FAQ #3 to double check and see how the data is actually written.

I suspect that you are using Windows->Properties to view the data.  If so, what is happening is that Windows will combine three separate tags to list under the "Tags" property.  Those are IPTC:Keywords, XMP:Subject, and XPKeywords. Odds are, one or both of the first two have the data as well, and you're only updating XPKeywords.

The XPKeywords tag is supposed to be a semicolon separated string, but it looks like Windows will also accept a comma separated one.  TIL.  But Windows will rewrite it as a semicolon separated string if rewritten through the Properties window.

One additional thing to take note of is that the XPKeywords is different from the IPTC:Keywords and XMP:Subject tags.  Those are fully separated list type tags and not comma separated strings.  Each entry is stored completely separate from the others and you can't simply write -Subject="one, two, three".  That writes a single entry with a value of "one, two, three", not three separate entries.

See FAQ #17 for more details on list type tags.