Add column to output csv file with subdirectory name

[jcusack]

Dear All,

I am new to ExifTool (and to this forum) but will be using it a lot to extract information from thousands of camera trap images. At the moment I have organised my images into species specific folders (e.g. Lion, Elephant, etc), which themselves are organised into camera specific folders (e.g. camera 1, camera 2, etc). I therefore have a hierarchy of subdirectories. I would like to extract the required exif information (see code below) from each image within this hierarchy and export to a csv database. However, for each image I would like to add two columns, one with the name of the camera folder and one with the name of the species folder. Is this possible? And how should I modify the code below?

exiftool -csv -r -FileName -TriggerMode -Sequence -EventNumber -DateTimeOriginal -MoonPhase -AmbientTemperature -SerialNumber -InfraredIlluminator -UserLabel /Users/jeremycusack/Desktop/CT_images  > Image_data.csv

Many thanks for your help!

Jeremy

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jeremy,

The easiest thing to do would be to add -directory to the list of tags extracted.

- Phil

[jcusack]

Hi Phil,

Many thanks for your previous answer (I was away for a while so only just saw it). Adding -directory to the tag list adds an extra column with this entire directory string. Although this is helpful, I was rather hoping I'd be able to separate out the folder names contained in the hierarchy into separate columns in my csv file. Does that make sense?

Thanks again,
Jeremy

[StarGeek]

I don't believe you can do it directly (though I could be wrong), but you can do it with a user defined tag.

I'm assuming that the very last directory in the path is the species name and the second to last is the camera.  For example,
/Users/jeremycusack/Desktop/CT_images/Some/other/directories/Camera/Species

Here's the config file I came up with using my limited perl skills

Code Select Expand


use File::Basename;
%Image::ExifTool::UserDefined = (
    'Image::ExifTool::Composite' => {
MyAnimalDir => {
            Require => 'Directory',
            # Grabs last directory
            ValueConv => '$val = basename($val)',
        },
MyCameraDir => {
            Require => 'Directory',
            # Grabs second to last directory
            ValueConv => '$val = basename(dirname($val))',
        },
    },
);
1;  #end

Using your previous example, the new command would be:

exiftool -config /path/to/MyConfig -csv -r -FileName -TriggerMode -Sequence -EventNumber -DateTimeOriginal -MoonPhase -AmbientTemperature -SerialNumber -InfraredIlluminator -UserLabel -MyCameraDir  -MyAnimalDir /Users/jeremycusack/Desktop/CT_images  > Image_data.csv

Obviously, you would have to change "/path/to/MyConfig" to the full path of where you saved the above config file.

edit: tweaked comment in config

[jcusack]

Many thanks for the config file, it works well and does what I was looking for. Looks like I need to develop some perl skills of my own...

Thanks again!