importing from .csv multiple files in different directories/folders

[sharppixels]

Thanks for creating such a great tool!

I'm using version 12.0, and I've got files spread out across different nested folders, and I'm trying to update their metadata from a single .csv file

Here's an example of the folders/files structure:

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Macintosh HD
  Test
    2023
      Aug
        06
          abc.jpg
        07
          xyz.jpg

I've got a csv file formatted like this

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SourceFile, year
/Test/2023/Aug/06/abc.jpg, 2023
/Test/2023/Aug/07/xyz.jpg, 2023

When I run my command with -v2, it outputs 

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exiftool -csv=/myFiles.csv -sep ',' .
Imported entry for '/Test/2023/Aug/06/abc.jpg' (full path: '/Test/2023/Aug/06/abc.jpg')
Imported entry for '/Test/2023/Aug/07/xyz.jpg' (full path: '/Test/2023/Aug/07/xyz.jpg')
    1 directories scanned
    0 image files read


Is it possible to use 1 csv file to batch multiple files when they're in different folders?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Phil Harvey]

You need to specify the root directory on the command line.  If you were in the /Test directory, then "." should be fine, but "/Test" would work from any directory.  However, in either case you need to add -r to recurse into subdirectories.

But your CSV file will probably need some changes.  First, the column headers must be names of the tags you want to write.  "year" is not a tag that you can write to a jpg file.  Second, you shouldn't have spaces after the comma separators in the CSV file.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

(Too slow, but posting anyway)

The CSV file is not a list of files for exiftool to process.  It's a look up table that it uses when reading files to process.

Since your files are in subdirectories, you would need to use the -r (-recurse) option for exiftool to find those files.  So your command should have been something like
exiftool -r -csv=/myFiles.csv -sep ',' /Test/

Now, a couple more possible problems.  The -sep option isn't used to define the character separating the columns. Exiftool defaults to a comma , but this may be changed with the -csvDelim option.

Instead, the -sep options is used for list type tags, such as Keywords or Subject.  Without it, the data in the CSV file for list type tags would be entered as a single string rather than multiple entries.

Also, the headers must be the name of actual tags. A column of "Year" won't write any data.

[sharppixels]

Thank you both so much!
I will give this a try and post back here my result

[sharppixels]

Thanks again!
Your much appreciated guidance worked well in solving this.
We're writing custom xmp metadata, so a config was also added

In our production environment, we'll have thousands of folders and hundreds of thousands of images, so what I ended up doing was to list out the folders that needed to be scanned and added them to the end of the command.

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exiftool -config 'path/to/config' -r -csv='/path/to/csv/' -sep ',' /Test/2023/Aug/06 /Test/2023/Aug/07 /Test/path/to/other/folder
Is there a better or more efficient way to do this when there could be thousands of images in the csv file?

[StarGeek]

In the case of the first two example directories, using /Test/2023/ and the -r (-recurse) option should work.

Another option would be load the CSV into a spreadsheet, copy the first column and paste it into a text file, removing the header and making sure there isn't any quotes or extra trailing characters.  You could then pass the text file directly to exiftool with the -@ (Argfile) option.

Example using LibreOffice


In this case, the text file is "temp.txt" and the command to read that file list would be
-@ temp.txt
There would be no need for any other filenames/paths on the command line.

[sharppixels]

Thank you for the -@ suggestion
I will give that a try!

[sharppixels]

Thank you StarGeek!
The -@ is exactly what I was needing!
Works Great!