Convert Picasa Captions to iPhoto Captions

[danglad78]

I'm a complete noob, and I have very little experience with coding and scripts.  I've tried to do my diligence int he FAQs and searches, but I cannot find an answer (or at least an answer that I can understand).

I just upgraded from an old Win XP machine to an iMac running Mac OS X 10.8.  I'm also moving from Picasa as my photo-management solution to iPhoto.  In Picasa, I have many photos with captions.  I understand that these are in XMP format.  iPhoto is unable to read these captions, but I can confirm they still exist on the JPEGs.  What I'd like to do is copy the captions from the XMP field to an iPhoto readable (IPTC?) field such that the captions are there.  Exiftools is a really powerful tool, and it seems like it could do what I ask, but I cannot figure out how to make that happen.

So, can anyone tell me if what I want is possible?  And if so, is there anyone willing to walk me through the process?

Thanks,

Dan
A Complete Noob

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Dan,

First, write a caption to an image with iPhoto then run this command to see where it was written:

exiftool -a -G -s image.jpg

Then run the same command on a Picasa image to see where the information is. 

Then run a command like this to copy the information from one tag to another (in this case, from XMP:Description to IPTC:Caption-Abstract):

exiftool "-iptc:caption-abstract<xmp:description" some.jpg

- Phil

[danglad78]

Phil,

Thanks for the help.  For posterity's sake, and for anyone else who's struggling with the same issues (and finding nothing on the web!), below is the line of code I used that copied the Picasa captions to a field that iPhoto reads as a caption.  I've tested it multiple times and just ran the script on ~1500 wedding and honeymoon pics, and then imported into iPhoto.  Great success!

exiftool "-exif:ImageDescription<xmp:description" [diretory/filename]