Hello to all - and Special Hello to Phil.

After squeezing my head without finding a solution I post my question:

(I posted something related here: copying the caption of different in one new image, but I can't create a script doing this process vice versa.)

I have a lot of images with IPTC headline, keywords and captions in the following format:

headline: language1 blabla blabla | language1 blabla blabla
caption: language1 blabla blabla | language1 blabla blabla
Keyword1: language1 bla1 | language1 bla2
Keyword2: language1 bla3 | language1 bla4
Keyword3: language1 bla5 | language1 bla6 etc.

This keywords look in some other applications like this (Comma separated): language1 bla1 | language1 bla2, language1 bla3 | language1 bla4, language1 bla5 | language1 bla6

One image is keyworded in two languages. The language texts in headline and caption are separated by a " | " Pipe and each language term in keywords is separated also by a Pipe.

This is a horror, cause it gives an information salad :)

I read in the Exiftool specifications on XMP, that it is possible to save separate languages in XMP fields with language code eg. -en for english. VERY nice! This is what I would like to do, but with my nixed language images.

The logic would be, that Exiftool takes an image and
1) looks in the above three fields for the " | " Pipe.
4) Then copys the the part before the Pipe to the related XMP-language1 filed and
3) then the part after the Pipe to the related XMP-language2 filed

The result would be an image file with separated languages in XMP.

Could anybody give me a hint on how to create the script for this?

Many greetings from
pixelpicker

Unfortunately, only the caption (XMP-dc:Description) supports alternate languages in XMP. The keywords (XMP-dc:Subject) and headline (XMP-photoshop:Headline) do not support alternate languages. (Only lang-alt type tags support alternate languages in XMP -- see the tag name documentation for details.)

Given this limitation, do you still want to try to separate the caption languages?

- Phil

I would suggest pulling out the languages by name, maybe something like this:

Here, the regular expression matches "language1" or "language2" (case insensitive), then takes all text following this up to the "|" symbol or the end of the string.

- Phil

Here is maybe a better way to do the keywords. The above example returned the entire keyword string if the language didn't exist, while this version returns nothing:

- Phil

WOW PHIL! Thanks for your quick and elegand solution! - like always :)

The idea to difference between the languages in the naming too is very helpful.

But I didn't understand correctly how I have to use the code, I must have made a mistake cause it doesn't do here what it should.

If I understood proper your code for CaptionLanguage1 and CaptionLanguage2 cuts everything after the | ? Or goes till the end when no pipe is there. But what does the

"language1" in this part? Is it a variable?

What I did is, to put your code of the CaptionLanguage1 in the config, renamed the necessary parts to "english" to extract the second language.
But ExifTool says: 1 directories scanned 0 images updated :(

Any idea whats wrong?

Have a good day.

Greetings from
pixelpicker

The expression for CaptionLanguage1 looks for the string "language1", and takes the text after this (up to the "|" or the end of the string, whichever comes first). You need to change "language1" in this expression to be the name of the actual language you want.

- Phil

Sorry, yes, I misunderstood. So you do simply want to extract all text before and after the "|":

and works like this:

- Phil

Great.

Sure, you can create custom IPTC tags if you want. Of course, nothing but exiftool could ever read them... :)

If you want to define custom tags with future compatibility in mind, XMP is the better choice.

- Phil