Using Exiftool for updating file metadata for sports team roster application

[Denis]

Here is my problem:

I cover various team sports events (soccer, volleyball, waterpolo, etc) and I need to tag all my photos with the jersey number, first and last name of the players in the photo.

Doing this individually in Adobe Lightroom or Nikon tools is too time consuming.

So what I have been doing is just tagging the jersey number(s) of the people in the photos in the IPTC Title field for example (could be any other field).

My short term solution is to create a DOS batch script to rename the file (per client requirements) and update other IPTC fields based on that tagging.

So, for example if Title has the jersey #50 in it, and the player is named "Jo Jmith", my script would look like (rename the file, set the object name, title and person in image).

-FileName=%%f_smith.jpg -objectname="50 - jo smith" -title="50 - jo smith" -personinimage="50 - jo smith" -if "$Title == 50" *.jpg

I have problem where I need help that have to do with the -if "$Title == 50" statement: If I have a player with "0" jersey, I get hits all over the place... not good!  Is there a way to write the conditional statement to trigger only on as exact word match?

Long term, I would like to write a C program to give me more flexibility...  Yeah, C because I don't know Perl...  I was wondering if there are any good "how to" interface the ExifTool perl library from C?  Examples, development environment setup, etc...

Finally, any other suggestions on how to do this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Denis

[BogdanH]

Hi Denis,

From my notices (I don't know perl either), the following expression will look on exact match only:
-if "$Title=~/\b7\b/" *.jpg
-in above case, result will be true if Title is exactly 7 (but not if title is 77 or 07 etc.). And similar:
-if "$Title=~/\b70\b/" *.jpg
-is only true if Title is 70 (not 7 or 0 etc.)

Bogdan

[Phil Harvey]

Thanks Bogdan,

About your Perl library question:  It isn't easy to call Perl from C.  Perl is very C-like, so programming in it is easy.  The only differences are that variables are not typed (just define all local variables with "my" instead of "int", "char *", etc), and you don't have to worry about memory allocation/deallocation.  Also, string manipulations are 200x easier in Perl because of the memory thing and the Perl regular expressions (which Bogdan has introduced to you).

- Phil