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Author Topic: MusicHawk - Picasa Tags to MC  (Read 1695 times)

marko

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MusicHawk - Picasa Tags to MC
« on: April 22, 2017, 01:49:29 am »

Marko, I just realized that the calculated field expressions you shared years ago, to pull values from MC's non-standard fields no longer seem to be updating Keywords.

I avoid using MC's proprietary fields Places and Events. And I don't explicitly put names in People. But...

Picasa's face recognition, grouping then matching with names, is amazing. I can then get those names into MC People by having Picasa "write faces to XMP". What stopped happening is the resulting People field values being added to MC Keywords.

The fields and expressions you invented look good, but likely I have forgotten something else that must happen. Any tips?


Here's the expression in a calculated data field (I named it Persons), sole purpose to populate Keywords with !People a tree of any values found in MC's MJMD People field. I think it is the same you posted way back when, the same assumption of max 18 names in People list (don't know how many I actually might have).

Once it was "set" it worked, don't know what if anything has changed, though now I've switched from "set" to "forget", fuzzy about what triggers the expression to execute.

Code: [Select]
listbuild(1,;,if(isequal(listitem([keywords],0,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],0,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],1,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],1,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],2,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],2,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],3,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],3,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],4,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],4,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],5,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],5,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],6,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],6,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],7,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],7,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],8,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],8,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],9,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],9,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],10,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],10,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],11,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],11,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],12,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],12,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],13,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],13,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],14,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],14,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],15,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],15,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],16,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],16,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],17,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],17,;),!People\,),),if(isequal(listitem([keywords],18,;),people,8),replace(listitem([keywords],18,;),!People\,),))
&datatype=[list]

Morning MusicHawk,

I hit this searching for more information on what you were looking for...
"Nested events - how to display, batch delete, batch assign, etc."

Is this where your field originated from?
It seems to be, but I'm confused by it, because, rather than push data into keywords, that expression is designed to pull data from the keywords field, strip any leading "!People\" text from the extracted data, and build a new list from the remainder. In this case, the result would be a flat list of names.

I get the impression that you don't specifically need that, because you say that you have MC auto importing Picasa data into the [People] field, which, it would seem, is essentially the same thing, unless I'm missing something else?

Are any other fields or expressions being used in this workflow?
Any links handy that might help me to help you?

-marko

MusicHawk

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Re: MusicHawk - Picasa Tags to MC
« Reply #1 on: April 22, 2017, 11:48:29 am »

Well, I've been way more "forget" than set". You are correct, the code I provided, originating from you years ago, is to extract !People\names from Keywords, in my case to use in a view I call Persons that nicely lists all the names, grouped, sorted, etc. That still works perfectly....IF the names are in Keywords in the !People\name format. What I've discovered is, they have stopped getting there. So, I asked the wrong question and provided the wrong code, sorry for the cloud of confusion.

The names were being put into field Keywords from field People. They were and still are put into People by Picasa. What is no longer happening is field People then populating field Keywords. What I have not located in my MC is any expression/code that would do this. Apparently I'm forgetting something, such as an external routine that reads People and populates Keywords.

It seems that whatever changed was almost 3 years ago, but I didn't notice. For photos that have People field values, I see Keywords populated with !People tags in Spring 2014, but by Fall 2014 I don't see Keywords !People tags in most photos that have People field values. (At times I have manually added !People tags to Keywords which confuses my history analysis.)

I usually update/upgrade MC promptly, so if I'm right about when MC versions switched, apparently the method was working in MC19 but stopped as of MC20. But somewhere in that same period I switched to a new PC running Windows 8, later upgraded to Windows 10. If anything external to MC was required, it might have gone missing at one of these transitions. I've learned the hard way that when MC does a version upgrade, it copies *almost* everything to the new version. What gets left behind is not identified or obvious, so I try to inspect the prior version and discover what I need to manually copy. But probably at the MC19-MC20 upgrade I missed something.

(A wonderful MC enhancement would be to have a specified folder to contain all user customizations -- visualizations, plug-ins, everything. MC would automatically scan this folder and treat whatever it finds as included in MC. MC would never touch this folder, and ideally MC could copy it during any upgrade. This is the safe-and-sane customization method used by a variety of development platforms, notably Drupal.)

But since my MC19 is long-gone, my trail has gone cold.


Background:
My workflow is this: I use Picasa to identify faces, which stores corresponding people names it its local system. Then, using the "experimental" option "Write faces to XMP", I cause Picasa to write the people names into the jpg files. MC then reads that data into its MJMD People field. In testing, that still works.

The need is to then have MC automatically read its own People field, and put each value into Keywords as !Person\value. This is what used to work, but now does not seem to. I'm still searching the forums, hoping to stumble across something.


PS: For those using Picasa for face recognition and tagging, there are various ways to do it.

Directly from Picasa, it seems (not really documented) that it will write face names to a tag that MC can read. The hidden trap is, "Write faces to XMP" must be manually triggered, easy to forget. There's no way to know which jpgs need it, so unless the action is run rigorously, the safe action is to select the entire library which can take a very long time to process. Even if being rigorous and careful, it might seem OK to choose only the newer photos to process, but any time a  face-name gets added or changed, it can touch any number of photos here and there across the entire library. I recently updated the name of a cousin who got married, ran Write faces on just her Picasa People album, which then updated the People tag of her ancient grade school photos too, and also a bunch of family photos where she was just one among many, easily overlooked if Picasa had not identified her face in the crowd.

And/or, a powerful tool is AvPicFaceXmpTagger, which can read Picasa face names and put them into image files with several options.
http://www.anvo-it.de/wiki/avpicfacexmptagger:main
The key is to send face names to one or more tags that MC can read.

Some of this is discussed here:
FaceTag Importer - Windows live gallery importer (but also Picasa)...
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=54119.0
A 2009 discussion, older MC and older Windows. I'm exploring how applicable it is current versions.


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Managing my media with JRiver since Media Jukebox 8 (maybe earlier), currently use Media Center for Audio/Music and Photos/Videos.
My career in media spans Radio, TV, Print, Photography, Music, Film, Online, Live, Advertising, as producer, director, writer, performer, editor, engineer, executive, owner. An exhausting but amazing ride.

marko

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Re: MusicHawk - Picasa Tags to MC
« Reply #2 on: April 23, 2017, 01:11:51 am »

Morning MusicHawk, I'm still confused, which makes me nervous because if I don't grasp what you have vs what you want correctly, I could end up offerring really bad advice that could make a real mess of your tags.

My confusion stems from this:
Quote
You are correct, the code I provided, originating from you years ago, is to extract !People\names from Keywords, in my case to use in a view I call Persons that nicely lists all the names, grouped, sorted, etc. That still works perfectly....IF the names are in Keywords in the !People\name format.
What the code actually does, is extract "!People\names" from [keywords], strip off the "!People\" bit, to leave you with a flat list of names.

Quote
The names were being put into field Keywords from field People. They were and still are put into People by Picasa.
Which means that your [People] field and your [Persons] field, would contain the same data.

Anyway, what does seem clear, is that you want the contents of [People] to be added to the [Keywords] field, in such a way that the names are all nested under the heading "!People", did I get that right?

Assuming your answer is "Yes", here is one way you can achieve that:
  • Create a new, calculated field. The expression will simply be =[Keywords]
  • Add this new field to your tag window. (Note that it mirrors any existing keywords data)
  • Click in this new field to edit, and enter: =[keywords]; !People\replace([People],; ,; !People\)

    To automate this, you would create an auto import rule that places that code into your new field.
    *note that I have not tested that this will work when MC is picking up changes to already imported files. If it doesn't, you will be left having to do this step manually each time.

MusicHawk

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Re: MusicHawk - Picasa Tags to MC
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2017, 08:58:53 pm »

Sorry to be  unclear, and I'm away from my MC Images for a week, but to not leave you dangling...

The problem arises at Keywords. I used to see Keywords populated with !People\name values, but that seems to have broken around the changeover from MC19 to MC20, don't know if that is a cause-effect or just coincidence. Possibly an external app or routine was doing this and stopped.

The source of Keyword !People\names is still OK, a list of Picasa-originated names in MC's People field. In Picasa when I add or change a face tag name, then tell Picasa to Write changes to XMP, a few seconds later I see the change in MC's People field. That's cool.

The breakdown is that the names just sit in People, but I want them in Keywords. Until it stopped working, the People names were added to Keywords as a list of !People\names. This was automatic, at least that's how I remember it.

Perhaps I have overlooked some Import code that I can't check until next week. Or perhaps upgrading MC19 to MC20 dropped something. Or perhaps there was an external tag process that used to be triggered. Or, perhaps I was doing something manually, your suggestion or similar, that I've forgotten. I have more digging to do. I'll post back if/when I can discover more details.

Thanks again!
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Managing my media with JRiver since Media Jukebox 8 (maybe earlier), currently use Media Center for Audio/Music and Photos/Videos.
My career in media spans Radio, TV, Print, Photography, Music, Film, Online, Live, Advertising, as producer, director, writer, performer, editor, engineer, executive, owner. An exhausting but amazing ride.
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