Variable mapping to metadata

General Discussions
1

Can you clue me to what metadata fields the special variables correspond? All of my photos have what exiftool reports as a “Description” tag, but until I massage the metadata a bit the description does not appear as a caption.

2

iScreensaver will pull metadata directly from the file, and on macOS it will also try to pull the data from iTunes (Music) or the Photos app. In another thread you reported a crash, and the crash was actually in the subroutine that pulls metada from the file. So this leaves us with some ideas/questions:

  1. How are you editing the description field? Are you using Photos.app on macOS or some other tool?
  2. If not, what happens if you import one of these photos into the Photos.app - does it show the Description field correctly? If you then import that file (drag & drop) into iScreensaver, does the metadata work?
  3. Since you were having a crash pulling the photo from a network filesystem, can you repeat a small test with some photos that you’ve copied to your local mac’s hard drive?
  4. If you can, email a couple of your files so we can look at the metadata and test it here.
3

Well, I determined that the %description% variable maps to EXIF:ImageDescription in the metadata, since my Olympus TG-5 puts the string “OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA” there, and that’s what appears in the iScreensaver caption for photos taken with that camera. But what do %title% and %location% (and all the others, for that matter) correspond to? When I try %title% or %location% with my photos in iScreensaver, no caption appears, although most of my pictures are both geotagged and reverse geocoded.
Anyway, to answer your queries:

  1. Most of the time I edit metadata using Phil Harvey’s exiftool and accompanying Perl libraries. This is on the PC, not the Mac.
  2. I haven’t tried importing my photos to the Photos.app. Not sure I want to since I manage all my pictures on the PC using digiKam. Right now I just network-copy the reduced-size albums from the PC to the Mac, then drag-and-drop the album hierarchy into iScreensaver.
  3. Once I move the photos over to the Mac, I have no crash problems with iScreensaver.
  4. Will do.
4

Thanks for these ideas Tom (and for your detailed emails as well). We have made improvements for the next version and will let you know when it’s ready for testing.

5

Thank you for reporting these issues to us.

We are happy to announce the release of version 6.5.0.1330 which improves or fixes many of these issues.
See Release Notes for details.

6

Hint: if you are editing photos and using a tool (such as exiftool) to set the title or description tag, you can use the following IPTC tags:

-iptc:ObjectName will set the %Title% variable
-iptc:Caption-Abstract will set the %Description% variable

See example here: https://akrabat.com/setting-title-and-caption-with-exiftool/