Importing Metadata Options?

Question

I've got several thousand images in various folders by event, and each has an Excel file that has what will be the caption, title, keywords and image filename.
...and I'd like to merge these either with the importing to Aperture, or afterwards. Any tips on tools/plugins? I've not found much myself.

Answer 1

If you are comfortable with scripting you can do this with the commandline tool exiftool.
Your workflow would be something like this:
For each folder of pictures:
Save the excel spreadsheet as a delimited field.  You probably don't want to use commas, since they separate keywords.  I often separate with semicolon or pipe(|) or at (@).  Be sure you have tags as the first row.
Now in each folder: run the script -- call it TagMyImages
Suppose that the excel spread sheet has
Filename | Title | Caption | Keywords
Tagmy images -- top level description.
Foreach line in the rest of the file
   ($filename, $title, $caption, $keywords) = split('@',4);
   $message = `exiftool -IPTC:Title=$title -IPTC:Caption=$caption -ITPC:Keywords=$keywords $filename`;
   print $message;
End
Now the details will vary depending on what scripting language you use.  Doing it in perl would be my stick.
You will need to read the manpage for exiftool carefully.