#34 IPTC keywords beyond 64 chars

[Anonymous]

It seems possible by some tools (Exiftool e.g.) to generate IPTC keyword entries that are longer than the allowed 64 chars. Reading files containing such keywords with mapivi will cause mapivi to import the long chain but also keeps mapivi complaining later on about to long a keyword in file X. Probably, such long entries have to be handled in some way upon ingest.

Examples:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Image::ExifTool qw(:Public);
my $imagefile = "some.jpg";
my $newtag = "Animalia.Arthropoda.Insecta.Odonata.Aeshnidae.Caliaeschna microstigma";
my $exifTool = new Image::ExifTool;
my $info = $exifTool->ImageInfo($imagefile);
$exifTool->SetNewValue(Keywords => $newtag, AddValue => 1);
$exifTool->WriteInfo($imagefile);

[Martin Herrmann]

Any suggestions how Mapivi should react in this situation?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

A way to handle it could be to write the copy the long tag to xmp where I think there is no such limitation.

For hanlding in IPTC, I could imagine that Mapivi sets some "continuation char" like in the old days (punch char 6 in Fortran ;)

E.g.

Animalia.Arthropoda.Insecta.Odonata.Aeshnidae.Caliaeschna microstigma

could probably be stored as

tag1 = Animalia.Arthropoda.Insecta.Odonata.Aeshnidae|
tag2 = Caliaeschna microstigma

| denoting that the full chain is condinued in the next tag. Depending on tag handling it could be advisable to use

tag1 = Animalia.Arthropoda.Insecta.Odonata.Aeshnidae|1
tag2 = |1Caliaeschna microstigma

to fiddle out the vairious chains and avoid mixture if the tags order gets mingled up. (I'm clearly no expert in IPTC internals.)

Indexing could then probably be done on those two tags concatenated, that is a search in the tree would find also the full form.

Still it seems, that probably moving keyword chains from IPTC to xmp and store only single words in ITPC. THIS however would probably require rework of current collections in the IPTC fields and redindexing. Could be timeconsuming on a larger collection.

BTW: mapivi is a really great tool. I love it!!!