Keywords Seperated by semicolons

[DrewFulton]

I am working on transfering my legacy image over to my new DAM workflow.  When I brought some of the old images in that were already keyworded in a previous program, Portfolio imported to iMatch to write to Raws (i think), the keywords were seperated by a semicolon. 

Any ideas on how I could take about 5000 images and turn all the semicolons into commas so they will show up in iView as seperate keywords instead of a single long keyword?

Thanks!

Drew

[peterkrogh]

Drew,
Does iMatch see the keywords as distinct keywords?
HAve you tried to index the images with iView to see if the keywords show up?
Peter

[DrewFulton]

Peter,

This problem is compounded by several issues, mainly that the drive that had the original portfolio file on it has crashed (won't power up) so I can't go all the way back to portfolio to export to iMatch again.

So, the files, when added to iMatch show up with keywords but it is essentially one long keyword seperated by semicolons.  In iView and Bridge it looks the same.  Any ideas?

Thanks for the help as always.

Drew

[havezet]

Hi Drew,

Keywords in IPTC (classic/IIM) is a so-called "multi" field. That means that an application is allowed to write multiple tag instances of the same number; typically one for each keyword. When you say that your keywords are read by iMatch as a single, semi-colon, separated string then I assume that your source system (portfolio?) worte this field as a single keyword. What I mean is that I think this is more a portfolio issue than an iMatch issue.

Either check if Portfolio allows you to write multiple keywords. If not, then I guess you have one more option; ask the iMatch community if they can write a script for you to tokenize the keywords again and write them as multiple keywords.

Hert

[DrewFulton]

Problem solved, just thought I would post my solution here so no one would spend any more time thinking about it and for archives sake.

1)  Import files in iMatch. 

2)  Import keywords from IPTC to Keywords property.

3)  Export database properties with content to XML file.

4)  Open XML file in text editor.

5)  Find/Replace all semicolons with commas.

6)  Import XML file back into iMatch with contents.

7)  Run All Purpose IPTC Script using a comma as a seperator for keywords.

  Move to iView and get on with life.


Thanks for everyone's thoughts.  This probably wasn't the most simple way but it worked.

Drew