[Shotwell] any news on multi-tag select?

[Dougie Nisbet]

On 06/04/2012 20:47, Lucas Beeler wrote:
>> There might be a third option. If
>> my db is ok, and the problem is
>> hotwell parsing the library, then
>> if I nuke the exif tags on all my
>> images and allow shotwell to
>> re-write them from its db, that
>> might work?
> In theory this approach should actually work. That said, make sure to
> backup your photo library (I'm assuming it's large so you might want
> to use an external USB or FireWire hard disk for this purpose) before
> nuking all the tags in all the photos in your library. Assuming that
> your Shotwell database does have correct hierarchical tag information
> in it (which you check by using, say, SQLiteMan) and if you turn
> metadata writing on, then correct hierarchical tag information should
> be written back to the photo files when you start Shotwell. Note that
> you may have to set the file modification timestamp on all of your
> photo library files to a date before your last database update
> timestamp to get this to work.

My first attempt certainly seemed quite promising, but I think it needs 
refining. My tags and ratings are all there, but things, such as GPS 
co-ordinates, (which are important for me), are gone.

Presumably this is a result of the sledgehammer command I used, i.e:

     exiftool -all= <fname>

and it should be just a matter of refining the exiftool switches to 
remove tag info only.

Next step is to restore the images (110GB) from backup, then have a look 
at the exiftool man page again and the tags. If anyone can help with a 
form of the command line that would amount to something along the lines 
of "remove all the tags and keywords, but leave everything else" I would 
be very interested. I guess if I play with 'exiv2 -pa' on a few images 
as Adam suggested it might give me an idea of what to feed to exiftool 
to tell it what to remove. There may be other tools - I've used jhead in 
the past to strip exif data but didn't find it too reliable.

Dougie