Import captions for kodak easyshare into iphoto

Question

I have thousands of photos in Kodak Easyshare on my old laptop and would like to get them into iPhoto on my new one while retaining the caption information. Is there a macro or some assistance for doing this...some code that can read the caption into from an Easyshare backup and import it into iPhoto?

Answer 1

I'm no programmer but I know a bit of UNIX/Linux scripting and I'm happy to say that I successfully exported my captions from EasyShare into the EXIF description field which is used in Picasa.  Before you get too excited, this is messy and you need know a bit about UNIX/Linux if you want to try this, but here we go...
The captions are stored in the EasyShare.me file which should be in Library/Application Support/Kodak EasyShare.  Copy this file to the desktop.  Then go to Terminal, cd to Desktop, and execute this crazy command:
cat EasyShare.me | LC_CTYPE=C tr "\000" \| | sed "s/|0|/~/g" | sed "s/int4/~/g" | LC_CTYPE=C tr '~' '\n' | grep "|JPG|1|." | awk -F\| -v OFS=\| '{print $(NF-5),$NF}' | grep -v "|$" > captions.txt
In order, this command:
changes binary nulls to pipes
changes pipe-0-pipe and the phrase int4 to newline
find only lines with |JPG|1| with some characters after that string
get the 4th from the last column and the last column
get lines where the captions is not blank
saves it all to a file named captions.txt
The key here is nulls are the delimiter in the EasyShare.me file and that the caption is always in a string that goes:
filename
column that we ignore
column that we ignore
JPG
1
caption
0
So we replace 0 with newline as well as int4 which just shows up everyone and makes our lines shorter.  Then we searched for lines with the JPG then 1 then something and we know the caption is the last column and the filename is five columns before the last column.
Now I strongly recommend that you manually review captions.txt.  The problem with the crazy format of EasyShare.me is that we can get only get the filename without the path and without the suffix.  So if you had two copies of the same filename both with captions it will show up twice in captions.txt.  Even worse if you have different photos with the same name (i.e. you bought a new camera and it started over with DSCF1000 for a second time) then there is no way to tell which one is which.  And the script which is below has similar problems because it updates all photos with the same filename with same caption.  If you have this problem, you will need to do a lot of this manually but you can still save a bunch of time updating the photos where you have only one version.
Now we have the captions and the files to update so we need to do the update of the EXIF field.  To do this, you must install Phil Harvey's ExifTool from www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool.
Then you can write a shell script to loop through captions.txt and update the description using exiftool.  The following script is rudimentary and has no error checking nor logging.  I also couldn't figure out the spaces so I just replaced them with ~ and then replaced back later.  But it works.  If you are a real programmer you will certainly want to improve it.
Good luck,
Cabe
#!/bin/ksh
for LINE in `sed "s/ /~/g" caption.txt`
do
    FILENAME=`echo $LINE | sed "s/~/ /g" | cut -d\| -f1`
    CAPTION=`echo $LINE | sed "s/~/ /g" | cut -d\| -f2`
    find ~/Pictures -name "$FILENAME.JPG" > find.out
    LINE2=`sed 2q find.out | tail -1`
    for FULLPATHTILDE in `sed "s/ /~/g" find.out`
    do
        FULLPATH=`echo $FULLPATHTILDE | sed "s/~/ /g"`
        if [ -z "$FULLPATH" ]
        then
            echo "$FILENAME not found"
        else
            exiftool -Description="$CAPTION" "$FULLPATH"
            echo "$FULLPATH updated"
        fi
    done
done