Comments on: Aperture AppleScript – Export & Restore Metadata

By: brett

brett — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:53:53 +0000

You’re very welcome! I’m glad you found these scripts helpful. I’m also happy to hear that you’ve been able to modify it to suit your particular needs.

One of the great things about making an app AppleScriptable is that it allows the users to use the app to do exactly what they want. I wish more developers made their apps AppleScriptable!

By: brett

brett — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:51:59 +0000

@Scott

Scott-

Unfortunately, most of the slowness of the script is due to AppleScript’s overhead. I generally try to optimize things where I can, but sometimes that simply doesn’t gain you much.

If you only wanted to work with a partial list of the Aperture metadata then things could possibly be sped up quite a bit.

By: Enrique

Enrique — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:02:52 +0000

Hi, since this post dates quite a bit, I just wanted to add a short update to to say that I have successfully used these scripts with Aperture 3.2.2.

I tweaked the export script to only export the version name, headline and captions, then I exported the metadata to a text file, imported that in Excel to send it over to my caption writer. When the captions were done, I exported from Excel a tab-delimited text file which was restored back to Aperture.

For those like me who have accented characters in their metadata fields, make sure that you restore from a text file which has a MacRoman file encoding. This can easily be saved with Textmate or BBedit.

Thanks to Brett for keeping these scripts available. They saved me a lot of time!

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:36:03 +0000

Hi Brett!
I am using your script to later create a table and points in a GIS. Unfortunately aperture’s export metadata puts the geographical coordinates in a format that I cannot get my GIS applications to accept. The coordinates need to be a number with a decimal and that’s what your script outputs. The problem I am having with your script is that it takes so long. I am planning to leave the script running all night to go through 900 images. My question is why it takes so long vs apertures export metadata which works very quickly? Can it be sped up?
Otherwise, thanks for providing a script which makes my workflow possible (albeit slowly).

By: Ken Davies

Ken Davies — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:59:37 +0000

Just a brief note to thank Brett for emailing me a version of the script that extracts the data to individual text files. Works perfectly and can’t thank you enough for the work.

Cheers,

Ken

By: Ken Davies

Ken Davies — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:56:01 +0000

Hi Brett,

Apologies for the long delay in responding. I somehow managed to crap out my Aperture library, lost an awful lot of metadata and got disheartened by the debacle for a while. I’ve got myself back up and running and noticed you mentioned you’ve done some work on the script. Did you manage to get a version with individual output files working?

One comment. I downloaded the version of the script at the top of this page and it requires you to have created the text file before it will work i.e. the “Choose” button is greyed out until you actually click on an existing file which it then overwrites. Is this by design?

Cheers,

Ken

By: brett

brett — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:02:30 +0000

I updated one of this script’s derivatives recently. The new version will export the metadata into a file per image. Email me the file and I’ll see if I can hack something together for you.

By: Lawrence

Lawrence — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 07:11:10 +0000

Hi Brett,

I’m using Aperture 3.1 and feel that your script could be very useful for the following task, though I think I’m missing a piece of the puzzle.

I want to create custom fields within Aperture which correspond to the Alamy.com-specific metadata fields. Although Alamy has a web based keyword tool, I would rather stay within Aperture to type up the data they need and export a csv. Alamy will accept the spreadsheet in lieu of using their online tool.

I could create the custom fields necessary in Aperture, but I would need to be able to output them as a CSV with a specific column order of standard IPTC fields and Alamy specific fields.

I’m not sure how to operate this script. It appears in my desktop script menu bar. It will ask me to choose a file, though what type it needs I’m not sure. It doesn’t proceed beyond that.

You mention that you haven’t tested it with Aperture 3, so that could be the problem. I hope that you have the interest to continue its development. I’ve been hunting high and low for an effective way of exporting all Aperture data fields, and I’ve found no tool for the job. Your script is as close as I have come. No one else is working on this as far as I can tell.

I can share the Alamy spreadsheet template if you are curious. Thanks so much.

By: brett

brett — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 22:55:19 +0000

Ken- Your email address bounced, but I had said that I’d like to try to build the script that you’ve asked about. I’ll see what I can do… stay tuned

By: Ken Davies

Ken Davies — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:55:21 +0000

Hi Brett,

Incredibly useful script for getting the metadata that Aperture doesn’t export (like lens model) to JPegs. I’m completely new to Applescript and wondered if you mind telling me how you script could be altered to output to individual files. For example create “image1.txt” for “image1″ in the library and so on. Many thanks for a brilliant place to start.