Need a script to update keywords for 20000 images in Bridge

You may wish to try DIY Metadata again adjusting your source .csv file as SuperMerlin noted…

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As ExifTool is command line interface based and not GUI, you may prefer to use the Bridge script option!

USING EXIFTOOL – PART A:

Before using ExifTool, one should backup all files first. By default ExifTool will create duplicate files, leaving the original files untouched but renamed for safety. So you may need at least double the free hard drive space available as the images being processed. If you have backed up your files, then you could skip the part where files are duplicated for safety.

I also recommend duping a small amount of files to a test directory, then testing that everything works in this test folder, before running on a large batch of images.

Just as there are specific file input requirements for the DIY Metadata script, ExifTool also has requirements of how import data should be formatted…

Firstly, let’s use ExifTool to recursively export the source filename and file system path and the keywords to CSV, in order to ascertain what format is required for the input CSV file (the example below is using Windows OS formatting). I created a test folder and sub-folder with files that were keyworded in order to “reverse engineer” the required info.

Run the Windows Command Prompt and enter the following data (be careful of copy/paste as it can change characters such as straight inch to curly double quote marks). Note that ‘Currentuser’ needs to be replaced with the username of Windows account user that is currently logged in (I have syntax highlighted the CLI code below to help break it up visually into it’s components):

exiftool -csv -r -subject "C:\Users\Currentuser\Desktop\test" > "C:\Users\Currentuser\Desktop\test\meta out.csv"

ExifTool will recursively scan the images found in the desktop folder titled ‘test’ Which returns a .csv file titled ‘meta out.csv’ inside the folder ‘test’ on the desktop of the current logged in user.

The contents of the ‘meta out.csv’ file reads as:

SourceFile,Subject

C:/Users/Currentuser/Desktop/test/META 1.jpg,"keyword1, keyword-A"

C:/Users/Currentuser/Desktop/test/META-2.jpg,keyword2

C:/Users/Currentuser/Desktop/test/sub_folder/META_3.jpg,subject3

What does this mean in relation to our input spreadsheet .CSV file?

1. We need specific column headers titled ‘SourceFile’ and 'Subject'.
2. We need both an absolute source path and source filename in our .csv file.
3. The separator for a .csv file should be a comma.
4. If there are multiple keywords, they need to be enclosed within inch marks using a comma separator.

We will now need to format our import file to suit these requirements. In your particular case, if “63679573” is the filename and the format is JPEG, you will need to add both the file path prefix and the file extension suffix to the name. If you need help in adding the file path prefix or the filename extension suffix of .jpg to your existing filenames, then it is easy enough to do so using a spreadsheet formula, or a regular expression capable text editor or even with textmechanic.com (the same is also true for enclosing your existing keywords with inch marks at the start/end).

If you need help with this text manipulation, let the forum know.

You can upload another sample file to dropbox when you have edited it if you like.

Let the forum know when you are ready to move onto the next stage of using ExifTool…

The filename should be in the first column I.E. filename.jpg and the file should exist in the selected folder or a sub folder if the relevant checkbox is ticked.