Load IPTC data from XLS/CSV/TXT

[kyc]

Whenever I was travelling around the world for a longer time I kept the descriptions and locations of the photos I took in an Excel spreadsheet since it was easy to find an internet cafe even in the remotest locations.

Now I learned about Lightroom and I want to start using it's capabilities to organize photos ... but how do I get all the information I have in Excel into the metadata of Lightroom? Basically I have the location information as well as the title/caption in text format and I want to import these to the corresponding IPTC tags.

Do you know of a way to get Lightroom to import that data? Is there an external tool that loads the data into IPTC tags? Can I access the Lightroom database with an SQL tool and insert the data via scripts?

I tried Exifer which can export but not import and also a trial version of Exif Pilot 3.2 that claims to do the trick but it always crashes on me when importing XLS or CSV

Any help is appreciated...

 

[johnbeardy]

There's no text import feature.

What else do you have available? You could get the data into iView by scripting, and use it to generate XMP sidecars, which you could then read into Lightroom.

Can you write VBA? One way would be to use a VB macro in Excel to generate XMP sidecar files.

Theoretically you could write the information directly via an ODBC link (look for open source driver for SQLite3), or update the database with SQL via the SQLite Database Browser or Access/ODBC. If this sounds like gobbledegook to you, then the learning curve will probably be long and hard.

You might look at exiftools which can write directly into files via the command line interface. Again, lots of scripting.

John

 

[Rootabaga]

Writing xmp files in excel

I saw this reply and am trying to do something similar. I use Lightroom for a master collection and will have submissions from users that don't have the capability to write ITCP files. I am wondering if there is a way for them to make photo/data spreadsheets in excel and then find an easy way for me to import that into Lightroom. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you.

 

[johnbeardy]

See previous reply and "gobbledegook" comment.

Also see http://basepath.com/ImageIngester/LRViewer-info.php