Of course, you can also quote the string with the parenthesis character, then it would probably look like this:

‘exiftool -title=”‘ & image_title & ¬
‘” ‘ & keywordslist…

That way, you can use the apostrophe within the title (but not the parenthesis).

The better solution (that will allow all characters) will probably need to be based on exiftool’s argfile option:

From the exiftool documentation:

“-@ ARGFILE

Read command-line arguments from the specified file. The file contains one argument per line (NOT one option per line — some options require additional arguments which must be placed on separate lines). Blank lines and lines beginning with # and are ignored. Normal shell processing of arguments is not performed, which among other things means that arguments should not be quoted. ARGFILE may exist relative to either the current directory or the exiftool directory unless an absolute pathname is given.
For example, the following ARGFILE will set the value of Copyright to “Copyright YYYY, Phil Harvey”, where “YYYY” is the year of CreateDate:

-d
%Y
-copyright<Copyright $createdate, Phil Harvey”

Your guess is probably correct. Seems a more generic solution would be needed.

One idea would be to write the tag/content as tab-separated pairs to a temporary file and then let exiftool read that file.

That file could probably be also stdin, leading to something like this (note that this is a coarse example from memory without any syntax check):

do shell script “echo Keywords \t” item j of assigned_keywords | exiftool -t …

(Note the piping character. I hope you are a bit familiar with unix scripting.)

(BTW, regarding my previous comment about the rating info: for reading, that seems to be available only via the plist iPhoto archive file, for writing, UI scripting would be needed. Of course it is also not very difficult to generate rating-based tags like R0, R1, R2..R5.)

This can easily be fixed by modifying the script by adding single quotes around each keyword, as it is already done for the other tags (have a look at the code above).

I.e. change this part to:

repeat with j from 1 to the count of assigned_keywords
set the keywordslist to keywordslist & ” -keywords+=’” ¬
& item j of assigned_keywords & “‘”
end repeat

Note that it might be also more practical to change the += to =, as somebody already commented.

What could be also added is storing the rating information, I think it should be available via Applescript as well.

Is there an easy way to modify the script so that two word keywords are functional?

Thanks so much for the awesome script!

Just a mental note to anyone viewing this:

Think anyone could build in a versioning comment system that lets a commenter mark up (any) code, hide the revised full version behind css (or something) while showing the markups? (It would have to roll into a blog/new commenting system)

Would be great for a page like this, where there would have been at least 3 different versions so far, and encourage more.

Will give it a go later tonight, I have hundreds of scanned images which I need to export with the correct (iPhoto) date.

Basically in the “tell this_photo” part I added:
set the image_date to the date

and then changed the exiftool shell script call to simply be:
“exiftool -DateTimeOriginal=’” & image_date & “‘ ” & “‘” & image_file & “‘”

Dunno if that’s useful to anyone, but this result saves me hours and hours of trouble in terms of getting my (properly dated) photos from iPhoto to Gallery 2.2 (http://gallery.menalto.com/)

Cheers!
Ryan

Does anyone know how one would modify this script to also copy the iPhoto date within an EXIF capture date header?

Cheers,
Ryan

Error: Error opening file - Angeles

And the second is this popup:

Error: [minor] Bad NikonPreview directory pointer for tag 0×2 - Users/Saraza/Pictures/2004/040928-11.JPG

I couldn’ t understand why this one appears.

Thanks!

@Heather - you need to first install ExifTool onto your Mac.

@Marty - you just need to select the photos you want to geocode and shouldn’t depend on the name of the roll - I will have to test more to check this out.

set the keywordslist to keywordslist & ” -keywords+=” & item j of assigned_keywords

to:

set the keywordslist to keywordslist & ” -keywords=” & item j of assigned_keywords

This will just clear the keywords before setting the new ones,

Thanks!