Updating IPTC fields with blank values

[tedca77]

I have been using the insertIPTC method:

Metadata.insertIPTC(fin1, fout1,iptcs,true);

I have created an new List of IPTCDatasets (iptcs) with only the properties I want to change. This works fine for updating the fields but does not work if you want to blank out (or remove) one of the fields.

So I am creating a List of all the IPTC metadata and removing the fields I want to blank out.

Metadata.insertIPTC(fin1, fout1,iptcs,false); i.e. with append =false

It would be nice if there was a easy way to create an IPTCDataset of all existing IPTC metadata - or maybe there is and I have not found it...
This is the approach I have taken.

 } else if (meta instanceof IPTC) {
                    iptc = (IPTC) meta;
                    Map<IPTCTag, List<IPTCDataSet>> datasets = iptc.getDataSets();
                    for (Map.Entry<IPTCTag, List<IPTCDataSet>> entrymap : datasets.entrySet()) {
                       List<IPTCDataSet> sdsd = entrymap.getValue();
                        for (IPTCDataSet s : sdsd) {
                            if (s.getRecordNumber() == 1) {
                                IPTCEnvelopeTag tag = (IPTCEnvelopeTag) s.getTagEnum();
                                alliptc.add(new IPTCDataSet(IPTCRecord.fromRecordNumber(s.getRecordNumber()), s.getTag(), s.getData()));
                            }
                            if (s.getRecordNumber() == 2) {
                                IPTCApplicationTag tag = (IPTCApplicationTag) s.getTagEnum();
                                alliptc.add(new IPTCDataSet(tag, s.getDataAsString()));
                            }

                           ... etc for the other IPTC Record Tpes

                        }


                    }
                    return alliptc;

,

[dragon66]

Just finished XMP API and it makes operations on XMP like a breeze! Remove/append/add works much easier. Tried a place holder API for EXIF but seems not as useful as XMP API. Maybe start next with IPTC as it seems clumsy to work on IPTC with the current low level approach.

[tedca77]

I have been using ICafe to extract the XMP and converting the XML to RDF and using rdf4j java library to edit the RDF (as RDF tuples) and then reload - How are you addressing this ?

[dragon66]

The API I created directly operates on different XMP properties bases on namespace and property name. It can take my XMP class as constructor argument and continue working on add/remove/append properties. Then create new XMP and insert to image.

Pretty simple and user can even create their own namespace and properties to work with the API.

[dragon66]

I added a new IPTC_IIM class to wrap the IPTC class and make it easier to add/remove/append attributes for an IPTC instance. You will need to read the IPTC from original image and operate on it if you need to remove or append attributes. If you don't want to keep the original IPTC, you don't need to read it. ADD operation will remove the old at the same time. APPEND operation will keep old of multiple items are allowed for the same tag. Otherwise override similar to ADD. I added REMOVE operation to remove either a tag, a whole record number related attributes, or everything from the existing IPTC. This makes working with IPTC much simpler. And you should not need to pass update = true anymore!