[KPhotoAlbum] Importing photo information

[Johannes Zarl]

Hi,

On Monday 26 August 2013 10:55:34 John Pearson wrote:
> I am not sure that this question is on topic for this list.  If it is not,
> could you advise me where to ask it?

No worries. This is the right list.

> I have approximately 10000 images which are largely scans of family photos.
> Kphotoalbum looks like the perfect tool with which to organize them.  Most
> of the images have captions identifying the people, places, in a separate
> text file currently.  It seems that the description field would be the
> perfect place for the captions.
> 
> I watched and read all of the documentation I could find and I found not way
> to import the captions as a batch process.  I tried entering a few
> manually; but that would be a very slow and tedious process.

Currently the only import format via .kim files. These use a file format 
similar to the one in index.xml, but with binary extensions. Personally, I'd 
rather interact with the index.xml directly. Especially if you already have a 
script that is almost there.

> My solution was to globally set the description field to a known phrase.
> Then I created a script to match file names and replace the known phrase
> with the caption line for the photo.  Checking the index.xml files with diff
> after the substitutions shows the substitutions are in the correct places
> and that nothing else in the index.xml file has changed.
> 
> However when I try to open the revised index.xml file with kphotoalbum, I
> receive the error message 'Failed to recover the backup: unexpected
> character'.  Searching for the phrase has not shown me anything useful.

I guess that you have some special characters that are not allowed inside XML 
attribute values. IIRC the contents of the descriptions should be XML-encoded 
("%quot;" for '"' etc.).

For Categories, you have the additional constraint that you can't use the "&" 
or "|" characters inside the value, because that characters are used 
internally by kphotoalbum. Aside from that, adding the Categories should be 
relatively straightforward since you already have a working script for the 
descriptions. If you need help with these, just ask...

HTH,
  Johannes