(Please be gentle. newbie here) - Picasa (IPTC) to Onedrive (EXIF?)

[flatjack]

Hi there,

I've recently started using Onedrive, to keep all my stuff. This includes a lot of pictures, both personal and professional.

I've spent the past decade using Picasa to add captions to my pictures. The iterface was simple, metadata was saved to the actual pictures, search was excellent. What else could a guy ask for?
Now that I've started to use onedrive, the first thing I've noticed is that the captions were not showing in the Photo "app" included in onedrive.

After some research I discovered the (plainly obvious to this community) that Picasa wrote in IPTC fields and Onedrive/Windows reads other fields/ fields (that I wasn't able yet to discover).

My objective is to pass the IPTC captions to the fields that windows/onedrive reads, so that I can have the metadata available in my cloud repository.

I searched to forum to the best of my abilities, but I couldn't find a way to do it in batches.
Can you guys help me?

Cheers, flatjcak

[Phil Harvey]

The hard part is determining which tags you want to move where.  The easy part is doing this in a batch:

exiftool "-desttag1<srctag1" "-desttag2<srctag2" "-desttag3<srctag3" ... DIR

See FAQ 2 and 3 for help determining the tag names.

Good luck!

- Phil

[flatjack]

AMAZING.

I DID IT!

You've planted the right seed Phill!

Now, for a more difficult trick: is it possible to do batches of directories within directories?

[StarGeek]

A little slow in my response, but I'm posting it anyway

That means that XPTitle doesn't exist for that file.

Are you sure you don't mean to write
exiftool "-XPTitle<Description" "C:/Users/flatjack/OneDrive/DSCN0655.JPG"
as I'm pretty sure that Picasa doesn't save any data to the Microsoft XP* tags.

I also suggest testing with a single file and use a copy, not an original, just in case things get messed up.

Can you give me more info on this Photo App?  Android or iPhone?  When I search the app store on my android, I only see OneDrive, not a photo app for it.

The OneDrive website seems to use XMP:Title for the caption but may use others.  If your testing showed XPTitle as a possible tag, then I would guess it uses the same tags as Windows does, which I document here.  For future compatibility with other programs, I would suggest copying to XMP:Title instead of XPTitle, as the latter is only used by Windows and rarely used by any other program.
exiftool "-XMP:Title<Description"  FileOrDir

Other testing indicates that the OneDrive website combines XMP:Subject, IPTC:Keywords, and EXIF:XPKeywords for keywords and also read GPS data, so if you wrote that with Picasa, it should copy over correctly.

[StarGeek]

I DID IT!

Do you mind sharing the command you used, in case anyone else comes across this thread in the future?

Now, for a more difficult trick: is it possible to do batches of directories within directories?

Yes, add -r to the command to recurse into subdirectories.  Also, if you are absolutely certain it's working correctly, you might want to add the Overwrite_Original option, because without it, exiftool will create a backup file (ends with "_original") and that could quickly clutter up your OneDrive.

[flatjack]

Still here. Just trying to put togeher a nice presentation for the forum.
But, for some quick replies;

Phill,
1. Yes, I was writting the command line the other way around
2. I knew I should have been more clear when I mentioned  the "onedrive photo "app"": You are are right, there is only one onedrive app (by the way, I'm on android and Windows PC). What I wanted to refer to was to the feature that onedrive has - besides being a cloud repository - of managing the pictures: showing captions, geotagging, albuns, tags, the whole nine yards. The photos - as simple files - keep all their metadata, but the Onedrive Photo feature doesn't show, nor searches through, the metadata written in Picasa.

I'll be back

[flatjack]

Hello again,

Here are my findings:
1. Picasa wrote the comments in the following tags:
     - Description;
     - Caption-abstract;
     - Caption
2. Windows (10) and Onedrive both require the tag "Title" to be filled in order to show (and search within) the metadata

The command that did the trick for me was:
C:\Windows>exiftool -r -overwrite_original "-ImageDescription<Caption" "-XPTitle<Caption" "-Title<Caption" "-XPKeywords<album" "-Subject<Album" "-Keywords<album" "C:\Users\flatjack\OneDrive\pictures"

I did get the following warnings:

MESSAGE IN AL PHOTOS:
--------------------
Warning: [Minor] Unrecognized data in IPTC padding - C:/Users/flatjack/OneDrive/DSCN7593.JPG

LESS FREQUENT MESSAGES
----------------------
Warning: Error rebuilding maker notes (may be corrupt) - C:/Users/flatjack/OneDrive/DSC01281.JPG
Warning: [minor] Maker notes could not be parsed - C:/Users/flatjack/OneDrive/DSC01281.JPG

But they didn't seem to afect the outcome in a noticeble way... I'm I wrong?

Cheers
Flatjack

PS-As you can see, I've also change the tags for the subject field in Windows/Onedrive.

[Phil Harvey]

Makernote warnings are fairly common, and may be ignored unless the maker notes are important to you.

The IPTC warning is less common, and could indicate corrupt IPTC.

- Phil

[flatjack]

Thanks Phill.

But what does it mean, "Warning: [Minor] Unrecognized data in IPTC padding"? Which one of the tags has "unrecognized data"?

[Hayo Baan]

From the description I gather it's unrecognised data in the padding, so not in a particular (IPTC) tag. But it could be an indication of some corruption in the file, check the metadata (and image) to see if you can spot any problems. Also you may want to run exiftool -G0:1 -a -warning -validate on that file to get a detailed report of what may be wrong with the file.

[Phil Harvey]

The IPTC has some unused data after the last record.  Normally this is just zeros if it is for padding.  You can do a -v3 or -v4 dump to see what this data is.

- Phil

[flatjack]

Hello again!

I've came across some files that have comentaries in more than one tag. For instance, they have both the "caption-abstract" and "Title" tags with (diferrent inforamation). How can I concatenate both values in just the "title" tag.

What I'm looking for is the command that would return:

"Title",i+1 = "Title",i + "; " + "Caption-abstract"    ; where i is the original value and i+1 is the modified valued, build up on top of the original

Thanks

[StarGeek]

To combine Title and Caption-Abstract you would do something like

"-Title<$Title $Caption-Abstract"

You can also add arbitrary text when you run a command like this
"-Title<Title: $Title Caption: $Caption-Abstract"

In cases when the tag name runs into other text/numbers/underscore, you would use braces to separate the tag name e.g. ${Title}_$Caption-Abstract