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Wayne Hewitt Posts: 38
5/1/2017
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Is there any method of selecting a number of photos and then exporting their descriptors such as to be able to get them into a spreadsheet, one row per picture, multiple columns for descriptors?
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Andy Schmidt Administrator Posts: 114
5/1/2017
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Dear Wayne!
With StudioLine, you are able to Export the content (=images) of any image archive folder to your disk drive, optionally including an .XMP "sidecar" file for each image. That XMP file will contain all the metadata (=descriptors) for the specific image, using standard XML. You could choose a minimal picture size and high compression, since you are not actually interested in the picture itself.
Once the XMP data resides on disk, a fairly straight-forward XML transformation application (program or script) would have to be written, that iterates through all the XMP files, extracts any data of interest and then condenses that into one row per picture, likely outputting the result as a CSV file. Spreadsheets software can work with CSV files.
So - yes, what you are looking for can be accomplished, but you will need someone to create some "middleware" that transforms the industry standard XMP files into your proprietary single-file tabular format.
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Wayne Hewitt Posts: 38
5/3/2017
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Thanks Andy.
I have played a bit with the xmp files and see that they do contain what I am looking for.
I will see what I can find on the web in the way of extraction apps. It strikes me that a CSV report feature would be a small step from the Describe form. It could be so simple as to dump a Note or Comment field for selected pics to a CSV file. The user could then populate the Note or Comment field with Right Click Inserts, including delimiters, as desired. Maybe something to think about.
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Wayne Hewitt Posts: 38
5/3/2017
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I've been playing a bit and have created a hammer and tong method loosely based on my suggestion.
There are several hundred photos for which I am trying to get specific Descriptors out into a spreadsheet.
Using the Right Click feature I concatenated all of the Descriptors under File Name with a semi-colon between each.
I exported the photos to a Folder on my computer.
I opened Command Prompt, Changed Directory to that Folder and issued dir /b > Descriptors.txt
(the /b generates only Windows FileName.FileType)
This created Descriptors.txt in the Folder and it contains the Windows FileName.FileType values, one line per file
I then Opened Descriptors.txt in Excel via the Open command which allowed me to specify the semi-colons as delimiters
And there I have it; one column per Descriptor type, one Row per photo.
Perhaps easier in today's scripts but the last time I coded was DOS 
Is this worth sharing on the Forum?
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Andy Schmidt Administrator Posts: 114
5/4/2017
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Hi Wayne,
you definitely deserve extra credit for thinking out of the box. Of course, it requires someone with a bit of a technical mind, but more importantly, it assumes that the descriptors you are working with are almost strictly alphabetic. Many commonly used special characters that might appear in location or MANY corporate names (such as the Ampersand, or the Forward Slash in dates) would break your scheme. Double-quotes might even appear in names, such as:
Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson
or
Welcome to the "Big Apple"!
Here the list of special characters that would be rejected by Windows if you were to include them in your concatenated file names:
- < (less than)
- > (greater than)
- : (colon)
- " (double quote)
- / (forward slash)
- \ (backslash)
- | (vertical bar or pipe)
- ? (question mark)
- * (asterisk)
Either way, thank for sharing this and I'm glad it happened to work out in your particular case. Maybe it can help another user with a similar limited dataset, but the content restrictions prevent it from being generally applicable.
Best Regards,
Andy
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Wayne Hewitt Posts: 38
5/4/2017
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Andy
I betray my age
As a point of interest, Win10 seems to substitute an underscore for invalid characters.
While correcting the few invalid characters I had used I was unable to convince the Search and Replace to find any argument with a " (double quote) which I had used for 'Inch', or a - (hyphen). Is there a delimeter to tell this function that I am specifying the " or - as text?
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Andy Schmidt Administrator Posts: 114
5/5/2017
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Wayne Hewitt wrote:
unable to convince the Search and Replace to find any argument with a " (double quote) which I had used for 'Inch', or a - (hyphen).
I was able to search and replace for double quote and dash/hyphen without problems - filling out the screen below. Assuming you are using a recent version, I suggest you carefully inspect the screen right before clicking "OK" to be certain that the CORRECT Descriptor (still) appears in "Include" and "Search In" is correct:
Otherwise, you'll have to use the Service Request feature so that you can submit your diagnostic logs to our support team for inspection.
PS:Wayne Hewitt wrote:
I betray my age Oh... if your earliest memories are MSDOS, then I have you beat by one complete generation of computing technology :-)
edited by Andy Schmidt on 5/5/2017
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