Make sure you replace the ‘opening’ smart single quote in the exiftool command with a regular single quote. Otherwise iPhoto will return EOF errors (which it in turn gets from exiftool).

You can fix the problems using a Find and Replace All.

You’ll have to replace the “smart” quotes with a regular quote and do the same for the smart ’single quotes’. When you’re replacing the single – with two real dashes make sure that you check that the subtraction signs for the date and time calculation are functional.

Happy iPhotoing

I have the ‘09 version of iPhoto.

@iStar yes, it works on the “modified” file, not on the original. Though, when you export the photo, if you choose the right “kind” when exporting, and ask to include “title and keywords” and “location information”, the exif fields will be written in the exported file.

The problem seems to be that the scripts works fine, and is actually able to write the required fields in the exif info of the “modified” file, but all the exif info present in the original file are lost!

Now, I am trying to figure out how to “merge” all the exif fields, so to be able to export a file that has all the exif informations (i.e. all the fields), those from the original file (written by the camera) and those from iPhoto (e.g. the comments)

But there is a problem when there are pictures edit (/ iPhoto Library / Modified) original photos are not marked by the script.

Have you a solution to remedy this?

Thank you

Need to replace this part of the script:

—————
set output to do shell script ¬
“exiftool -title=’” & image_title & ¬
“‘ ” & keywordslist & ¬
” ” & ” -comment=’” & image_comment & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Copyright=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -CopyrightNotice=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Rights=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Marked=’” & Copyrighted & ¬
“‘ ” & “‘” & image_file & “‘”
do shell script “rm ‘” & image_file & “‘” & exifToolOriginal
—————

With this:

—————
set output to do shell script ¬
“exiftool -title=\”" & image_title & ¬
“\” ” & keywordslist & ¬
” ” & ” -comment=’” & image_comment & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Copyright=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -CopyrightNotice=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Rights=’” & copyright & ¬
“‘ ” & ” -Marked=’” & Copyrighted & ¬
“‘ ” & “\”" & image_file & “\”"
do shell script “rm \”" & image_file & “\”" & exifToolOriginal
—————

The only changes are on the image_file and image_file strings. For all three occurrences, I had to replace the surrounding single quotes with a \”.

Now it works like a charm!!

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!