10.4: Use some iView Media Pro data in Spotlight

May 17, '05 09:27:00AM

Contributed by: thomas_witt

Tiger only hint I am using the great application iView Media Pro (IVMP) for managing all my digital pictures, because the possibilities of this app for cataloging are far beyond iPhoto's capabilities.

IVMP stores all the metadata in its internal database, leaving the original pictures untouched. Additionally, IVMP can sync the medata back to the pictures, reflecting in XMP/IPTC/EXIF data for the picture. I thought I could use this metadata for searching in Spotlight, but unfortunately, Spotlight only searches for EXIF data, not for IPTC data (like location, people, etc.). In principle, it should be possible to write a Spotlight plugin which does this job, but I haven't found anything like this yet.

In order to find the pictures through Spotlight anyway, I've found out that the Title field in IVMP reflects in the EXIF title, which indeed is indexed by Spotlight. So I wrote a small AppleScript which collects the important metadata (Persons, Locations, Events, Captions) and writes them into the Title metadata. That's not the best solution one can imagine, because it doesn't allow one to search specifically on a certain field. But for typical one word searches ("Paris", "Berlin", "Portrait") it's perfect.

Usage: Select the pictures you want to update and run the AppleScript. Afterwards, sync the annotations back to the pictures. Please keep in mind that this script will OVERWRITE YOUR TITLE tags. That means, this data will be LOST! So if you've got important data in the Title tags, be sure to append them first e.g. to the caption. You could write another AppleScript for that ;-).

The script should be easy to understand, so feel free to modify it for your needs.

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