Smart Album based on obscure EXIF tags?

Thanks. I agree that relocating the originals to a single folder, processing them, then re-consolidating them makes life easier. Unfortunately I'm still too much of an exiftool lightweight to do something like "for each of these 1000 files, if 'GPS Satellites' is unset, then add the keyword 'HeyApertureThisIsTheFileYoureLookingFor'". If you happen to know, I'd be grateful!

Thanks,

Mike

(Also, GPS version came out the same, as did Map Datum, unfortunately.)

Hey, thanks! I'm traveling today and don't have a good way to post, but you're exactly right: I would like to identify all pictures (within a directory) that have no "GPS Time Stamp" EXIF tag set and somehow mark them in a way that Aperture can identify them. (I'm assuming this means adding a keyword, but something else would be fine too if that's difficult... maybe deleting the "GPS Direction" tag which is meaningless in files tagged using the simple logger.)

Relevant notes:

• I don't know if there's a distinction between an EXIF tag being unset and it being set to a blank string. To clarify: if I simply type "exiftool <filename>" for a file tagged using one GPS/workflow, the output includes a line for "GPS Time Stamp" with a value next to it, whereas if I do the same for a file tagged using the other GPS/workflow, no such line appears.
• Some files do have keywords set already. I'm happy appending an additional keyword to identify these images but I don't want to overwrite the keywords already in place.

Thank you!

Thanks!!! I'll give this a try tomorrow (with all due caution).

Just to double-check, your command mentions "$GPSTimeStamp" however the actual tag name has spaces in it. Will that cause problems?

Thanks again!

This is fantastic and worked beautifully! Many thanks!

(Note to any others who may find these instructions: the method above may result in losing some existing Aperture keywords from updated files. I believe that this is because Aperture does not write its keywords to the original files... and when exiftool updates the keywords tag, aperture replaces the list of tags rather than appending. So make arrangements to back up your keywords, e.g. by creating a few (non-smart) albums containing all pictures with each relavent keywords.)

-Mike

Hi,

I relocated all of the relevant originals to a single directory, ran the exiftool command there and then re-consolidated.

Here's my suspicion of what's going on. First, here's the overall story of what I did:

1. Import pictures into aperture
2. Add keywords in aperture
3. Re-locate the originals
4. Run the exiftool
5. (note that the original keywords have been lost -- only on the files that passed the -if condition)
6. Re-consolidate the originals

My understanding is that when you add a keyword in aperture, it does not edit the original image file but rather adds the keyword in the Aperture metadata database. I *think* keyword is actually a single text string which aperture parses (looking for commas) to separate individual keywords. When exiftool changes this string, it does, in fact, append the "No GPS Time Stamp" keyword, but it is appending it to a blank string (since the prior keywords are stored in the Aperture metadata DB -- which exiftool isn't accessing -- rather than the original image files). Then Aperture sees the updated "Keywords" tag -- which now contains only "No GPS Time Stamp" -- and seems to replace its keyword list with the contents of this EXIF tag, rather than intelligently determining which changes were incremental and applying them.

Put another way, I think Aperture says "hey, the keywords field has been updated on this file. let me update my metadata DB to match -- which means overwriting the existing list 'PriorTag' with the string 'No GPS Time Stamp'." rather than saying "hey, this keywords field has been updated on this file. I notice it didn't use to have 'No GPS Time Stamp' included in its comma-separated list and it does now, so let's append 'No GPS Time Stamp' to the list of keywords I have for this file in my metadata DB.")

For what it's worth, I saw the same behavior if I replace 'No GPS Time Stamp' in your command with ', No GPS Time Stamp'.

But I'm all set now; thanks again!!

-Mike

Interesting. How do you turn that on? (I've found the command to write IPTC metadata in original files, but tha doesn't sound like what you're talking about...)

Thanks,

Mike