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PowerShell: Querying, Formatting and Exporting Tags on Picture Files

One of the many Sisyphean tasks my wife performs is keeping the all the metadata tags of our digital photographs up to date.  She meticulously keeps tabs on the tags she’s used but with the sheer number of photos, new photos being added and the children starting to take photos too it’s a pretty time-consuming task.

So;  what she needs is a list of all the tags used on each picture file (including ones missing with tags) in an easily sortable format.

Being the caring husband that I am I started spending some time solving that problem with PowerShell.

Of course, she might have been happier with me doing all the ironing for a week so she can focus fully on sorting the pictures out but this is a)  more efficient and b) a solution that she can re-use (teach a woman to (photograph) fish etc) and so is a better use of our time.

At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Continue reading “PowerShell: Querying, Formatting and Exporting Tags on Picture Files”

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PowerShell : Getting All File Metadata from a Folder

I noticed my wife going through some photos manually tracking which tags were used to classify different subjects so I wondered if I could write a little PowerShell that could return all the file metadata on a set of files (or the contents of a folder).  That would enable me to list out all the tags we’ve used on our photo collection, filter them and generally get an idea about the organisation.

After a quick Google I found a great script here from Microsoft but there were a few additional things I wanted it to do;

  • Return the information in a stream of objects so I can use the pipeline.
  • Accept input from the pipeline.
  • Use either a path to a file or a path to a folder;  if the latter is provided recurse through all the sub-directories.
  • Get more than 266 file properties.  In fact, assume we don’t know how many file properties are going to be listed on the file and get them all.

Updated script and explanation follows! Continue reading “PowerShell : Getting All File Metadata from a Folder”

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Tagging MP3 Files in PowerShell

One of my main familial duties is as CD-Ripping monkey.  Once we get a CD I need to convert it into a format friendly for the various streamers, phones, players, alarm-clocks and secret digital diaries (yes, really).  This usually just involves ripping an album to Flac and MP3 and uploading it to the file-server.

Some audio-books and multi-CD albums are more difficult though;  the more CDs there are the more chance that iTunes or the FreeDB databases have mismatches of metadata between the discs (maybe CD #1s album title is “Status Quo Greatest Hits CD1′ and CD#9s album title is ‘Status Quo – Greatest Hits (CD 9)’).  Clearly mismatched metadata is a crime against humanity and I can’t leave it uncorrected.

You can only imagine how diabolical the Harry Potter Unabridged audiobooks are;  each has 25+ CDs with with 50-70 files per disc.  When we get a new-one they often sit on my desk for days, taunting me while I choke back a sob and try not to remember the manual corrections required the last time I converted one.

This time my PowerShell-fu is strong and it comes to the rescue with some automatic tagging.  The details are below.

Continue reading “Tagging MP3 Files in PowerShell”