Why this is important: I'm graduating from BYU, and I'll have to relinquish this mac. However, I would still like my files. Especially all of the comments I have made on photos in my photo albums. Unfortunately, I've been using Canon's software to transfer photos to my laptop. (This is incredibly clunky, and I'd avoid using it at all costs.. The first thing wrong with it is that the main import program is called "Camera Window", but when I try to launch it using Spotlight, I can find it, and press enter, then get the message: "This program cannot be executed directly".. man.. good thing I let it install shortcuts to my application bar thingie and didn't delete them like I usually do, or I wouldn't be able to start importing pictures ever.) I have also been using the companion Canon ImageBrowser (clunky too.. undo/redo doesn't work for many of the features, and the category things are all messed up) to input all of my captions for the pictures from my internship in Germany, as well as all the rest of the pictures I have taken in my life.
Naturally, it would be the pits to loose all of these captions, so I wrote Canon, asking how to transfer comments from one computer to the other, basically asking if there was a database file somewhere, or something like that. A polite foreign help person responded by saying that that was impossible. And that if I had any questions, I should reply to the email. I replied, and asked to be put in contact with an ImageBrowser specialist. The polite foreign help person's manager who was also polite and foreign responded, saying that the first polite foreign help person was an authority on ImageBrowser. Bleh. Partly due to finals, I let it be, meaning to come back to it later. Needless to say, I fished the email from Canon out of my junk mail, and emailed them back a scathing comment about their tech support quality that claimed that they were experts in something that they were not, and gave false technical responses... I couldn't prove them wrong with anything except for my gut. Which is usually right.
And now I'm back. Looking at the new Dell Studio XPS 13s, and wishing I knew how to transfer all of my comments for my pictures to another computer.(Lest you think this is a trivial task, I have taken over 4500 pictures in less than a year, with most of them having comments.)
I started out with a simple test proposed by my father.. make a change on one of the comments, then use find the find files that were modified in the last minute. ("find . -mmin -1"). I discovered that the JPEG picture file itself was being modified. That was nice. The diff tool usually doesn't compare binary files, but I found out that the -a flag forces a line-by-line comparison of files. I did a diff on a before copy of the picture, and the after copy of the picture, and discovered that amidst the binary junk, the comments were in the JPEG files themselves.
See, polite foreign canon help person? My gut is right. You are wrong.
So I wrote a little comment extractor in perl. But it couldn't quite weed out all of the binary. And took quite a while (.5 seconds... but for 4000 pictures..) to complete. I looked on line for perl tools to extract metadata from JPEGs, and found a perl module here: http://search.cpan.org/~jcarter/Image-IPTCInfo-1.9/IPTCInfo.pm that says it will let me get at the comment data. (Unfortunately, I am having troubles enabling the root account on my mac... stupid macs. Or perhaps I just don't know what I am doing. Which is probably the case.)
This perl module relies on the standards set up by the IPTC. So I guess they do have a use. And I'm glad they set up that standard. Bless their hearts.
So, I'm on my way to not only being able to transfer pictures and comments off of this mac, but also to creating my own picture comment reference library, where I create a text file of all of the comments, and just search through that to find pictures of "berlin" or "university" or "mouse" or "paris" or whatever. However, it's too early in the morning, so I'll do this later.
And so it stands:
Polite foreign help person: 0
My gut: 1
IPTC: 1 assist
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