Converting from WLPG to Lighroom - Huge library

[CoolSwoosh]

Hi All! I just found this application and it is great. I have a photo library of 200k+ photos all tagged within Windows Live Photo Gallery - with Face Tags, Keywords, and Location tags. This has worked okay but recently the application has been crashing due to the size of my library.

Therefore I am looking to switch to Lighroom or another program that can actually support a library of this size and with a company that actually maintains their products!

I think I have two main problems on how to get my meta data from WLPG standards to MWG standards.

1) Face Tags
2) Location Information

On 1, For Face Tags, it looks like a configuration file and solution has been extensively shared and developed, which is be greatly appreciated. (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,4361.0.html). I will be testing this weekend.

On #2 though, It is a bigger challenge. I have some photos that I have tagged with a location manually, and some photos from my iPhone or GPS-enabled point & shoot that have GPS data stored in the Exif tags. It looks like WLPG stored the location in: LocationCreatedCountryName,LocationCreatedProvinceState,LocationCreatedCity,LocationCreatedSublocation.

Is there any known solution on how to convert these location tags to the Exif standards (-GPSLatitude -GPSLatitudeRef -GPSLongitude -GPSLongitudeRef)?

I haven't found one so far. My preliminary thinking is that I may have to export each filename and old location information to csv, do some type of API lookup to get the GPS information, and then write that back to the same file using the tool.

Am I thinking about it the right way? Has anyone else faced the same challenge?

Your help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Phil Harvey]

I found a few web sites that will do this:

https://www.latlong.net/convert-address-to-lat-long.html
http://www.mapseasy.com/adress-to-gps-coordinates.php
http://www.unbolt.net/geocode_convertor.php

The last one uses a Google maps function to get the lat/long.  It should be possible to write a script that uses Exiftool and Google Maps to do what you want, but this would be some work.  There may be an app out there that already does this, but I didn't find it in my search.

- Phil

[CoolSwoosh]

Thank you Paul. I also want to thank you for all of your hard work on this priceless tool to help us get our photo libraries organized.

Would it be relatively simple to take an input file with the file path and the 6 required GPS fields, and write those fields to the appropriate file?  Is it as simple as:
exiftool -csv="c:\Users\Phil\test.csv" "c:\Users\Phil\Images"

where the first row has the Sourcefile, 6 GPS fields, and then one row per file name with the full path?

[Phil Harvey]

Would it be relatively simple to take an input file with the file path and the 6 required GPS fields, and write those fields to the appropriate file?  Is it as simple as:
exiftool -csv="c:\Users\Phil\test.csv" "c:\Users\Phil\Images"

where the first row has the Sourcefile, 6 GPS fields, and then one row per file name with the full path?

Yes.  Simple as that.

- Phil

[CoolSwoosh]

Phil, if the full filepath is in the csv file, would the command still include "c:\Users\Phil\Images"? Not quite sure how this would work...but my guess is exiftool is smart enough to figure the paths out :-) ?

[Phil Harvey]

The CSV doesn't specify which files to process.

You specify the files to process on the command line ("c:\Users\Phil\Images"), and ExifTool looks up each file in the CSV to get the tag values.

The paths in the CSV should be based on the same directory that is specified on the command line, but ExifTool also checks the absolute path if it doesn't find a match in the CSV based on the directory as specified.  (This sounds complicated, but you shouldn't need to worry about this.)

- Phil

[CoolSwoosh]

Thanks again Phil, hopefully I don't have to bug you anymore after this :-)

What format do the GPS fields need to be in, before I start to convert :-)

It looks like some of my current pictures have the following format: 39 deg X' AA.BB" N
But I see in some other sites using the raw number like 48.78284833333
Or I see in ExifPro - something like: 39.0, XX.Y, 412/100

Just want to make sure I get to the right format before I attempt this massive effort.

[Phil Harvey]

This question is answered in detail in FAQ 14

- Phil