A second photographers' workflow: photo keyword search

[Stephen_C]

This links to my other photography workflow: XMP Explorer. This workflow is, in some ways, complementary.

 

I'll not trouble you with full details of the workings of the workflow for they are covered very fully in the ReadMe. Instead, I'll mention some of the more important points:

1. You must have installed the free command line utility ExifTool. That is the only dependency.
2. This version of the workflow will find keywords only in .xmp sidecar files or embedded in .dng or .cr2 files.
3. You can search for more than one word but only if they are effectively one keyword and the words are separated only by a space (e.g., Botanic gardens).

Here are some screenshots to give you can idea of what the workflow does, starting with choosing the folder in which you wish to searc:

 

 

Here are the searchable results:

 

Of course, as in my other workflow you can then choose to view the photo, reveal the photo in finder or view more metadata for the photo.

 

A final note about keywords

Photo keywords may be either flat or hierarchical. By way of example:

Kolkata, Cat, Home are "flat" keywords.

Places|India|Kolkata, Animals|Felidae|Domestic cat and Places|England|London|Home are hieracrhical keywords.

You need to set the workflow configuration checkbox to suit the style of keywords that you use. If you do that, and use hierarchical keywords, a search will find anything within the relevant hierarchy (e.g., India). If you use hierarchical keywords and don't check the relevant configuration setting your search will find only the last item of the hierarchical keywords (e.g., in this case, Kolkata).

As I use hierarchical keywords I've had little chance of testing the workflow against flat keywords so let me know if you experience problems when searching for flat keywords. You may in any event need to experiment with combinations of embedded and heiracrhical keywords in the configuration to discover what provides best results for you. In summary, keywords are something of a challenge—as you may already know!

 

GitHub download link

 

Stephen