Pictures database and library mode; scan EXIF and IPTC metadata tags into a SQL db

Hi Fungify,

please check your IPTC tags.
From XMP only the person tag is imported and the tag "<MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordIPTC>" is an XMP tag which is not used.

Arne

(2012-04-30 18:07)Xycl Wrote:  please check your IPTC tags.
From XMP only the person tag is imported and the tag "<MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordIPTC>" is an XMP tag which is not used.

I know - it was more a feature request than anything else. I would very much like for all of the keyword / tag fields to be scanned and combined into the database, as it seems that there is no singular standard, so it's pretty much hit or miss whether you favorite program stores the information in IPTC, XMP or maybe in a combination.

Concerning my woes with unicode in description: You are right. When looking at the field in Irfanview the field is displayed exactly as it is in the addon, but when extracting the information with other software, it looks all right. Yet another inconsistency to face I suppose

Once again - thanks for continuing the addon. I do remember you boldly declaring your intentions to only fix the unicode problem and nothing else - yet you're still here and adding features and fixes. Thanks a lot.

FFY

Hi Fungify,

two issues.

1) In your example XMP RDF there two identical keyword lists. MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordXMP and MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordIPTC. Both lists contain the same keywords.
I dont't think that it makes sense to display a keyword twice for one picture only because it's in two different keyword lists, isn't it?

2) I entered into IrfanView as a keyword. MyPicsDB displayed it correctly. Then I added a second keyword with Microsoft Picture Gallery.
After that IrfanView shows but deleting, readding and rescanning the source in MyPicsDB still shows
That works because I modified the IPTC parser 2 months ago to first try utf-8 encoding. And if doesn't work (because of ascii codes higher than 128) the IPTC parser will use CP1252 (Windows Western Europe) encoding.

I don't know what's wrong with your picture.
My only explanation is that it is neither utf-8 nor cp1252 encoding.

Hi,
Just recently installed the my pictures database to get a convenient interface for browsing my photos. Problem is that my xbmc is installed on an apple tv 2 and my pictures are stored on a NAS. First I tried to scan the pictures of the NAS folders through the xbmc addon interface without success, then I found a post in this forum saying that you need to mount network drives to get the addon to index the pictures correctly. I tried moving a few pictures locally and tried again and this time it worked.

Unfortunately I can not move all my photos to the apple tv and I have no idea how to mount the NAS folders on my appleTV installation, if I could be done at all.

I assume the setup with an ATV and a picture library stored in another network location is a pretty common one, so I really hope there is a solution...

Any hints would be highly appreciated.

Many thanks,
Jonas

1) XBMC is able to connect to net shares. But, every add-on written in Python must use the normal Python file functions to access remote directories or files because XBMC doesn't make the remote file function calls availble!

That means that Windows is the only OS where Python add-ons can access remote files because of notation \\server\share\file. And even this only works when your local XBMC user has access rights on the NAS because you cannot pass user & password information with this notation.

For every UNIX OS like Linux or MacOS you must mount the net shares in order to access them from Python add-ons.

2) I don't own an ATV but I read that you should use the Zeroconf Browser to mount AFP shares because there is no Samba client for ATV. Of course, this is only possible with a NAS which supports AFP.

Thanks for your quick reply Xycl. I decided to try the \\server\share\folder approach since my NAS does not support AFP. This was however not as easy as I hoped it would be. First I tried adding the path through the XBMC add source command, secondly I tried to enter the path directly in the sources.xml file where XBMC seams to store all available sources. Either way I was not able to use the path in the mypicsdb addon (it seams like xbmc automatically changes all '\' into '/' but I am not sure this is the main reason it won't work).

I also spent some time looking for a list of paths for the my pictures database similar to sources.xml but I could not find it.

Is there anyone who has any idea to overcome this problem?

(2012-05-05 11:39)Xycl Wrote:  1)
In your example XMP RDF there two identical keyword lists. MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordXMP and MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordIPTC. Both lists contain the same keywords.
I dont't think that it makes sense to display a keyword twice for one picture only because it's in two different keyword lists, isn't it?

I agree. The right approach would IMO be to consolidate (all) the lists - so that "Bear, Car, House" and "Bear, Jack, Jill" would equal "Bear, Car, House, Jack, Jill".

(2012-05-05 11:39)Xycl Wrote:  I don't know what's wrong with your picture.
My only explanation is that it is neither utf-8 nor cp1252 encoding.

That is so strange. I'm using Windows Live Photo Gallery to tag the pictures, so I'm hoping that isn't the issue. Will test a lot more and get back with info.

EDIT: Well - solved that problem. I deleted the captions with WLGP and re-inserted them again, and this time they were written correctly. Bizarre considering that is was WLPG that wrote the captions in the first place.

FFY

Xycl, here is the full translation of strings.xml for French :

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=2660

There is a little mistake in French translation given previous post :

Correct translation

Is there a way to edit metadat from the addon ? For example, to add personn, category, keywords, ...

If not, how to add those metadata to pictures ?

Tagging software

Windows:

1. Microsoft Picture Gallery for person & keyword tags.
2. Irfan View. The program with the panda icon. It's for IPTC tags.
3. ExifTool together with ExifToolGUI for EXIF, IPTC & XMP tags.
   

Other OS:
Don't know.