I am using preview (that comes with OS X El Capitan) feature to convert a file form TIFF format into JPG for example. I expected the export process will include the original comments, but it doesn't happen (it applies also for the tag fields).
The generated JPG file has no comment
The compression and change image format work, but the META INFO such as comment or tags are not exported.
Any suggestion or workaround about how to include that information. I need to convert about 500 images so manually copy/paste doesn't work for me.
Updated Answer
In the light of your comments, I think the best way forward is to try and identify how/where the comments are stored for each platform (Windows vs macOS) and then to decide which method you want to use going forward.
macOS Finder/Spotlight comments will not be legible on Windows, so if you want Windows compatibility, you need to standardise on JPEG or EXIF comments.
I recommend using exiftool which you can install with homebrew, using:
brew install exiftool
Then I suggest you try extracting the comments from your files to see how/where they are stored:
exiftool -a image.jpg
will show you all tags in image.jpg. Your comments may be under:
comment - which is the JPEG comment, or
EXIF:UserComment - which is the EXIF comment
If you find your comments in the JPEG or the EXIF section, you can extract just the comments with:
exiftool -comment image.jpg # extract JPEG comment
exiftool -EXIF:UserComment image.jpg # extract EXIF UserComment
Add the option -s3 to suppress the field-names in the above to save having to parse them out.
Likewise, you can set the comments with:
exiftool -comment="FUNKY JPEG COMMENT" image.jpg # set JPEG comment
exiftool -EXIF:UserComment="FUNKY EXIF USER COMMENT" image.jpg # set EXIF UserComment
You can also extract the EXIF user comments to a CSV with:
exiftool -EXIF:UserComment -csv *.jpg
SourceFile,UserComment
a.jpg,FUNKY EXIF:UserComment
b.jpg,b FUNKY EXIF:UserComment
You can also apply comments from a CSV.
You should also be able to extract macOS/Spotlight/Finder comments using the script in my main answer:
$HOME/macOSGetFinderComment "/Users/someone/soneFile.tif"
Original Answer
I would suggest you try the following using ImageMagick.
First, use the Finder, or any other tool you are familiar with, to make a copy of your photos including the entire directory structure to some new place where we cannot damage your existing photos. So, let's say you copy (NOT move) the entire tree of TIFs to a subdirectory called "NEW" inside your HOME directory.
Then start the Terminal and change directory to "NEW":
cd NEW
Easy Method
If all the TIFs are in a single directory or two, just use mogrify:
mogrify -format jpg *.tif
Harder Method
If the TIF files are in multiple directories, you will need to work a bit harder. Inside Terminal copy and paste this:
find NEW -name \*.tif -exec sh -c 'new="${1%.tif}.jpg"; convert "{}" "$new"' _ {} \;
That starts looking in the "NEW" directory for files named "*.tif". When it finds one, it starts a new shell (sh) passing it the filename of the TIF. It then works out the new filename by replacing a trailing "tif" with "jpg" and invokes ImageMagick convert to do the conversion.
As regards the Finder/Spotlight comments, here is a little script to get the Finder comment of a file:
#!/bin/bash
# macOSGetFinderComment
# Pass an absolute path to the file!
file=$1
osascript<<EOF
tell application "Finder" to get comment of item POSIX file "$file"
EOF
And here is one to set the Finder/Spotlight comment:
#!/bin/bash
# macOSSetFinderComment
# Pass an absolute path to the file!
file=$1
comm=$2
osascript<<EOF
tell application "Finder" to set comment of item POSIX file "$file" to "$comm"
EOF
So, I would save those 2 scripts in your HOME directory and then make them executable with:
cd
chmod +x macOS*FinderComment
Then save this file in your HOME directory under $HOME/CopyComments:
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for f in $(pwd)/*.tif; do
comment=$($HOME/macOSGetFinderComment "$f")
new="${f%.tif}.jpg"
echo Setting comment of $new to $comment
$HOME/macOSSetFinderComment "$new" "$comment"
done
and make it executable with:
chmod +x $HOME/CopyComments
and run it with:
cd NEW
$HOME/CopyComments
I have posted this problem also in Apple Community, here is the solution proposed by VikingOSX. It is a big piece of code, so better download it from here or directly from the Apple Community Link mentioned. Here is a description about the solution as described in the original post:
Prompts for a source folder, and a destination folder.
Duplicates folder hierarchy from source to destination folder.
Selects all TIFF images in the folder hierarchy and converts them to JPEG.
For sub-folders and their files, transfers the original Finder comments, color tags and tag name(s) to the destination hierarchy.
The compression level for the JPG file is high, it can be modified for: medium or low in the line: save this_img as JPEG in outfile_name with compression level medium with icon
Limitation: Source folder can only contain one-level of sub-folders. Ignoring this will result in unplanned results.
Additional Comments
Uses a with timeout clause to allow for large number of files. AppleScript does not yet support Finder tag names, so this script uses AppleScript/Objective-C to get and set those tag name(s). Due to this extension, the script now requires AppleScript 2.4 and must be run on OS 10.10 or later.
Due to the AppleScript/Objective-C code, the script cannot be run interactively as a script/script bundle without using the control+command+R keyboard shortcut. A test is made when the script starts, and will warn appropriately. It is best to save the script as an application to avoid this keyboard shortcut altogether.
Usage
Save the script and then copy and paste the file contains into the Script Editor (you can find the application in the folder: Utilities under the name: Script Editor), compile and save the file with the format: Application, then double click on it to run the script application.
I have tested the script under with Mac Air 2010, with OS El Capitan, for a folder with 884 TIFF files with 2.25GB size and it takes about 18 minutes to convert them into JPG files with medium compression level. The generated files will contain the tags and comments from the original equivalent TIFF file.
Disclaimer
Comment and tags generated in one platform for example Windows or mac OS are not visualized in the other platform. Tags created in Windows are treated in mac OS as keywords (Comand+i for visualizing them), but comments generated in Windows are not visualized in mac OS. This is general incompatibility problem that apply for photos in any format (for example TIFF or JPG).
EDIT (updated solution for solving cross-platform problem with comments)
Taking the idea from #MarkSetchell, I adapted the original script to at least solve the cross-platform problem from macOS to Windows, i.e. a comment from macOS can be seen in Windows platform. The idea is to use EXIF metadata. Then the Applescript will invoke the shell script for invoking the exiftool:
set uxFilepath to POSIX path of NewIMG
do shell script "/usr/local/bin/exiftool -overwrite_original -EXIF:UserComment=\"" & cmtstr & "\" " & uxFilepath
Windows processes the UserComment metadata from EXIF as a regular file comment. Now same comment on the TIF file will be on the JPG and also because such comments were copied (copy-paste) into an EXIF metadata the same information will be visualized under Windows. The same idea can be used for other file properties, in case Windows/Mac read it.
The EXIF metadata in macOS can be visualized from command line as suggest #MarkSetchell, but also from Finder: Command+o (to launch preview app), then Command+i (to launch the inspector). Then click on tap: "More Info", then the tab EXIF.
For the opposite process will require an script that does the opposite, i.e., copy EXIF comment using exiftool, into macOS comment. I have verified that in such case the Windows comment will appear under the label: XPComment. The script uses: UserComment, but it works using XPComment as label in both directions.
I have some video files in a directory which can't be opened. The problem is that some of them have been wrongly transcoded, so they can't be opened with QuickTime.
What I was wondering is if there is some kind of script I could write that would read through all the files in a directory and try to open them with QuickTime, and if they can't be opened, to move them or do something else.
My actual file directory would be something like this:
--Main folder
---Subfolder
-----video.mov
-----video.mov
------Sub-Subfolder
--------video.mov
--------video.mov
---Subfolder
-----video.mov
-----video.mov
------Sub-Subfolder
--------video.mov
(...) and so on
I hope I've explained it well so you can understand it... If someone could help me, I'd appreciate it so much.
Thanks!
The looping part is pretty easy, and should look like this :
for x in `find <folder> -name "*.mov"`; do <validate movie file command>; done
For the validate file command there's a suitable option in ffmpeg utility which is basically a video converter, but you can convert the input video to NULL and just read input file and report any errors that will appear.
ffmpeg -v error -i ${x} -f null - 2>error.log
If I have the following directory:
C:\Users\mkt\Desktop\Music\Tool\Lateralus
and want to open all files contained in the folder using cmd prompt. how could I do that?
I know that the following line will open one of them:
cd C:\Users\mkt\Desktop\Music\Tool\Lateralus\"01 - The Grudge.mp3"
But what about multiple files?
I am a noob at DOS and I really shouldn't be, but without practice you will never get better.
I am wondering, why it is opening your mp3 file with the cd command.
The cd command is used to switch directories, so this is something new for me.
I am a MAC OS user, so I could not test it, but if your given example worked, I think this should work too:
cd C:\Users\mkt\Desktop\Music\Tool\Lateralus\*.mp3
With the "*.mp3" you say, every mp3 file.
I hope this helps.
in past, I used feh to open directly the *.dot files (from Graphviz), which was great, as I didn't have to convert each *.dot file to jpg/pdf individually in order to display them (although, I imagine that it must have done it automatically there). I often get generated a lot of DOT files in different folder. However, after reinstalling my OS (Mageia), it stop working. I guess, normally feh is not supposed to open dot files, however, I got used to it. I know I could have written a script which would convert DOT to PNG in a tmp directory and open it with feh. However, does anybody know how to do it directly with feh (as I did in past)?
Now, if I type:
>feh graph.dot
feh WARNING: graph.dot - No Imlib2 loader for that file format
feh: No loadable images specified.
See 'man feh' for detailed usage information
So my question is rather how to include support for dot files into the Imlib2 loader?
Thanks a lot.
I am using PVRTexTool to convert png files to pvr files but the tool seems to only be able to run on one file at a time(wont accept *.png as file name).
does anyone know how to run it on a group of files at once?
Its really a hassle to run it on all of my textures.
In a shell, run
for file in *.png ; do
PVRTexToll $file
done
(I don't know how to call PVRTeXTool from a command line, so please substitute the second line with a correct version)
This is a general way to feed each file to a command which only accepts one file at a time. See any introduction on shell scripting, e.g. this discussion of the for loop.