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J
Jack
Inspiring
November 26, 2016
Question

Using Bridge to Search for all Metadata containing a Phrase

  • November 26, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 3162 views

I have been using Adobe Bridge to search a collection of images for those in which all metadata contain a phrase, with a degree of success. I knew I had loaded my keywords with an encyclopedic set of catch-all words, that were eating-up the search engine efforts. I was getting literally thousands of false positives. To fix this, I selected those false positives in Adobe Bridge, and deleted all keywords from them. Well and good, I thought, but no: many of those images are STILL returning a false positive, despite the fact that those keywords have been stripped out of them.

Question for you: where else in the image files, and using what recommended tool(s), shall I look to find these metadata in order to purge them?

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    1 reply

    Stephen Marsh
    Community Expert
    Stephen MarshCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 26, 2016

    Open a file with a suspected “false positive” into Photoshop, then use the file menu/file info command and take a look at the appropriate metadata area for the keyword, such as Basic or Raw Data. This file info data can also be accessed from Bridge.

    It could be that your search criteria in Bridge is incorrect.

    For another opinion, you can use ExifTool to inspect the metadata.

    The following command will test a top level/parent folder and all sub-level/child folders for a specific keyword titled “my-keyword”

    exiftool -if '$subject =~ /my-keyword/' -subject -r '/Users/currentuser/Desktop/my folder'

    If you simply wish to inspect a root folder/subfolders and list all of the keywords, then:

    exiftool -subject -r '/Users/currentuser/Desktop/my folder'

    To write a .CSV spreadsheet file of the files and their keywords, then:

    exiftool -r -subject -csv '/Users/currentuser/Desktop/input folder' > '/Users/currentuser/Desktop/keyword-output.csv'

    NOTE: These code examples are formatted for the Mac OS, MS Windows would use straight double quote marks " and the expected \ file path formatting.

    J
    JackAuthor
    Inspiring
    November 26, 2016

    Thanks much; very helpful. Found a false entry under Advanced | IPtC Core. That is where I will now do global edits to purge those entries.

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