Fix Gallery3 to extract IPTC headlines and captions
Gallery3, a web based photo album organizer, can extract the IPTC.Caption field of photos you import. This caption is then used to set the description of photos. However, this default behavior might not be what you would expect.
Introduction to Gallery and IPTC
Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer. Gallery3 intends to replace the famous Gallery2. At the day of this writing, Gallery 3.0.2 is the latest release. Please find more information on the website.
The IPTC IIM is a standard defining a set of metadata directly saved in photo files and thus allowing the portability of photo information and the compatibility between photo software. More information on IPTC can be found in the resources.
Change Gallery’s default behavior
The current stable release (Gallery 3.0.2) only extracts the IPTC.Caption field of photos you import. However, the world is imperfect and photo software are not using the same IPTC fields to designate the title and the description of a photo. As far as I know, metadata fields should match:
IPTC.Headline or IPTC.ObjectName => Title IPTC.Caption or IPTC.Comment => Description
As I share my Gallery3 space with other users (who are potentially using different software) and that we usually set only a title to pictures, I’d like Gallery to automatically find and set the photos titles. In other words:
if IPTC.Headline or IPTC.ObjectName is set
photo.title = (IPTC.Headline or IPTC.ObjectName)
if IPTC.Caption or IPTC.Comment is set
photo.description = (IPTC.Caption or IPTC.Comment)
else if IPTC.Caption or IPTC.Comment is set
photo.title = (IPTC.Caption or IPTC.Comment)
You’ll find my patch here. Enjoy it! I did not send this code to the official project because developers don’t seem to agree on IPTC tags use (see the tickets in resources).
Resources
- My patch
- trac tickets concerning this subject:
- IPTC norm:
I am sure this is exactly what I need. My IPTC fields are jumbled (thanks to iView Media Pro!) and need to extract IPTC Contact so its also searchable from inside G3 along with IPTC Keyword.
Does this code (with the obvious edit to address Contact field) make this happen?
If so, how to install the .patch? (Sorry – I am new!)
Any other help you can suggest for a fairly new user?
Thanks anyway for proving that I am not the only one with such a challenge!
Hey!
I’m still far from being an expert with Gallery, but I think you should be able to extract your IPTC contacts but using the same principle. Just set the correction filed in the structure pointed to by $item.
This patch is applied with the following command :
$ cd /path/to/your/gallery3
$ patch -p1 < /path/to/gallery-3.0.2-exif.patch
I hope this helps :)
Oh, and note that the patch style works with the last version of gallery (3.0.4).