Exiftool

[johnbeardy]

Has anyone here been looking at Exiftool and have any tips / contacts?

As a background project, I've been looking for a component to update XMP - one application might be to exchange labels between iView and Lightroom. It looks to me like Exiftool can handle this on a command line basis, and with DNGs. I've only experimented a little but was happily able to generate XMP sidecars from DNG files and thought I'd throw the idea into the pool here and see if any interesting ripples emerged....

John

[clear_blue_skies]

It's not clear what your intended purpose is.  Is it a one time thing?  Or do you want to sync metadata repeatedly?

If you are going to sync metadata repeatedly, I think accessing the metadata databases directly is a better idea.  It seems like you need something like Annoture, but for Lightroom <--> iView,
instead of Aperture <--> iView
  http://www.tow.com/annoture/

Peter

[johnbeardy]

Peter

It's for wide-ranging use and something that would be repeated. The initial thought is indeed to exchange label data between LR and iView, using the DNGs as the carrier, but I'm also frustrated that in iView I can't map to specific XMP namespaces likeI can in Portfolio. I hadn't thought of seeing what Annoture does, but that's a good idea.

John

[DanZemke]

John,

I just started to play with the XP executable (version with embedded Perl) and was impressed.  I waded through his support forum and came away with the impression that it's a very mature app, the author fixes bugs very quickly and really knows his stuff.  I'd send Phil Harvey a clear, but concise note on what you want to do and ask his advice.

Dan

[rogerhoward]

Hi John,

I've done a lot of integration with Exiftool and can only say good things about it - in the years when even Adobe offered very little in the way of XMP integration tools (and even today), Exiftool was not only the only good option then, it was/is a great option even today. It's what Adobe should have provided from the start, IMHO, if they expected XMP to get any real traction.

How can I help? Any specific questions? It's fast, and does what it says very well - documentation is good, price is right, and it runs anywhere. I've integrated it into a couple major DAMs on both Solaris and Windows 2003, into a number of Web apps on Linux and OSX, and into a ton of workflow tools on OSX and Windows XP.

[johnbeardy]

Hi Roger

Thanks for posting. I'm a way off doing anything, with more urgent things to get finished first, but would it allow me to extract and set the values of specific namespaces? eg iView writes the coloured label to the Urgency field but I'd like to to write directly to the Adobe field.

John