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| Is this the future? |
I guess I finally broke the delayed post pattern now that I'm finally finding a good use for this thing--psuedomemory for the technology shit I always forget about. I spend half my life trying to Google shit I Googled five years ago (and again three years ago, and again eighteen months ago...) Bookmarking pages hasn't really done me any good, because I forget that I bookmarked a site (and also because there are times I find the bookmark, but can't remember why I saved it, haha.)
So today's episode of "Chris' only reason to post an entry on this elderly blog" is brought to you because I have like 15,000+ pics that aren't really organized. Back when I used Windows, Picasa made things easier because of the face tagging technology. If you wanted to find a pic of a certain person, you could just click their name and voila, you were good to go.
However, Picasa typically writes those tags to an internal DB and not to the images themselves. There's a way to get Picasa to do that, but it writes them to a weird XMP field that isn't typically used by any other photo organizer.
I'm using Debian and GNOME as my desktop environment, so I'm using the default image manager that comes with the distribution. Unfortunately, it does not use XMP tags for organizing or searching, so I was basically stuck trying to find some way of migrating those Picasa XMP face tags (mwg-rs: Regions/ mwg-rs:RegionList[1]/mwg-rs:Name) into something that another application could search.
The solution is actually really easy to use, but the hard part was actually finding it! Google searching was a little wonky and the results weren't all that clear. I finally found this post in the Exif forum, but if you didn't phrase your search terms precisely that way, you'd never find it. Here's my useless search history:
shotwell search xmp
mwg-rs:Name to exif tag
mwg-rs:Name
linux photo program that can read xmp face
how to search xmp tags
The post I linked to above was exactly what I needed and it actually was super easy to do. It's literally one line, assuming all of your photos are in a hierarchical directory.
Here's a video walk-through of how to make that happen:
It only took around 20 minutes to run through about 17,000 files in 254 directories. Not too shabby!
Here are some links to the stuff that powered today's post (all excellent, Open Source projects)
ExifTool by Phil Harvey- "a platform-independent Perl library...for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files."
Shotwell- A digital photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment.
Kazam Screencaster- The screen recording software I used to record the above video.
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