Possible Enhancement - Aliases

Posted on 2006-02-15 17:10:25-08 by themonk

Hi Phil...

Just a suggestion ...

The aliases are a great way of extracting metadata from equivalent tags..

I use them to extract equivalent values from either the IPTC or XMP blocks..
ie. OriginalTransmissionReference or TransmissionReference

However, because aliases do not work for WRITE operations my code has to explicitly
set the individual tags if I wish to modify them...

Would be nice if I could just specify an alias and have ExifTool update all the relevant tags..

This would make my code cleaner as I can use aliases in the code and
configure the values which are written to from a single ImageExifTool configfile ....

What do you think ... ?
Is it an easy mod ?
Leave it with you, in case you ever modify this area....

Direct Responses: 1810 | Write a response

Posted on 2006-02-15 20:08:21-08 by exiftool in response to 1805

Re: Possible Enhancement - Aliases

Hey. You're smart! :)

When I originally programmed this, I only allowed shortcuts that reference a single tag (ie. aliases) to be writable. I didn't see why anyone would want to write all tags in a shortcut at the same time, and I didn't want to add a potentially dangerous ability like this unless it was useful. (Dangerous because it would be possible to accidentally modify a number of tags at once.)

But you've found a use for this, which is cool. Also, I've just realized this is is a great way to delete a bunch of different tags at once, which is something a lot of people do (especially when trying to remove all information from a TIFF image).

So I have added this feature and it will be available in version 6.00 when released. Version 6.00 will be a production version, and I want to test it out as thoroughly as practical before release. If you want to help in the testing, you can download the 6.00 pre-release and try it out.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Direct Responses: Write a response