How Do I Get Metadata from Access/Excel to IPTC Fields?

[Martin Beebee]

Hi All,

Just finished Peter’s Book (great!), and I’m all ready to tweak my workflow and filing system. Here’s my first dilemma, though: Over the last few years, I’ve been quite good (I think) about using a controlled vocabulary to thoroughly caption and keyword all of my images. But I’ve done so with an MS Access database, not using the IPTC fields.

Now I’d like to embed all that great info into the files themselves. But how? I can easily export the data from Access to Excel or a text document, but how to get those data into the files' appropriate IPTC fields? I’ve looked around a bit in the user guides of Bridge and iView, but haven’t found anything useful. Does anyone know of a way to easily transfer all this info?

Admittedly, we’re only talking about a few thousand images, but I’d hate to copy/paste each one manually.

Thanks!
Martin

[johnbeardy]

Martin

You need some vehicle that accepts a text import or scripting. Do you have iView? You can script it from Excel or Access - that's how I originally got my metadata into iView (tens of thousands).

John

[Martin Beebee]

Hi John,

My iView trial just expired -- waiting to have a look at Lightroom before I decide on a DAM application. Maybe it's worth trying to get another demo.

So I would write a script in iView to accept/read an Excel/text document?

Martin