PlodWare Metadata Tagger

A free standing “Windows” executable, actually a copy of the SQLite-OLE application with an encoded, embedded script.

The source for the script (in PlodWare Basic) is available here PlodWare-MetaData-Tagger (2024-03-18) and can be loaded on to the PlodWare pwScripter executable, or if you want you can edit the source to suit your requirements.

You can download the standalone executable here PlodWare-MetaData-Tagger   (2024-03-18)

PlodWare Metadata Tagger was developed to create and manage metadata for the (~27000) digital images that I (currently) have, so that if and when an image viewer is available that can display embedded metadata, then I shall have the metadata ready to insert in to the images.

Although the motivation was metadata for image files, there is nothing to prevent this program handling metadata (i.e. tag groups and tags) for any other type of file.

Although metadata fields are defined for image types (e.g. Exif, IPTC, XML) I wanted a flexible and open (i.e. not committed to a specific format) metadata tool that can serve as the basis for future efforts to embed metadata into files.

So I developed PlodWare Metatagger to:

  • create a database (in SQLite format) containing information about the files under a file system location.
    • include the files under other file system locations
    • resynchronise the database with the files under the referenced file system locations
  • create columns in the database to hold related information. e.g. a who column to hold the name(s) of people in a particular image.
    I call such as column a tag group, in this example it is the who tag group.
  • create a set of text strings, which I call tags, that belong to a given tag group.
    e.g. for the who tag group there could be the following tags: Mum , Dad , Cousin Fred , best mate
  • allocate tags to file(s) using drag’n’drop
  • find the files that have a user defined combination of tags.
    • bulk add/change/remove tags to those files
    • export a copy of those files to a folder
  • archive/backup a copy of the files referenced in the database to a folder (whilst maintaining the orginal folder structure and folder/file naming.
  • find files that are not in the database but are a duplicate of a file referenced in the database, and delete the external duplicate.
  • provide a scripting language to support user defined features and interfacing to some third party applications
  • export the database to Microsoft Excel (if you have it)
  • export the database to a CSV (comma separated variables) file
  • provide an Expert Mode giving access to the raw database and a “BASIC like” language with which you can write scripts/macros.
    e.g. write a script to extract information from the database and trigger a third party program (exiftool for example) to insert the information into image files!
  • specifically for the following image file formats there is the ability to define a rectangular region on an image and assign a tag group/tag to that region.
    • BMP (bitmap)
    • JPEG / JPG
    • WMF (metafile)
    • ICO (icon)
    • GIF

Details / help on the MetadData Tagger can be found at PlodWare AutoPage (ripetech.com)