Simple problem with recordTable

[Aditya Malgaonkar]

Dear trappers,

I am trying to create a species record for my study. The images have been renamed, placed in a directory containing station folders, metatagged with species identification in digiKam in a Hierarchial format (Species/Snow leopard, Species/Wolf etc). The Station folder "Choyam" contains no detection is that the problem ? and if yes how to solve it as quite a few stations in my study have no detections at all. 

 recordTable(inDir = "/media/kullu/_hdd2/Camera Trap Data/camtrapR/Pin_Valley_Oct-Nov_2016", IDfrom = "metadata", minDeltaTime = 30,
+ deltaTimeComparedTo = "lastIndependentRecord", timeZone = "Asia/Kolkata", writecsv = TRUE, outDir = "/media/kullu/_hdd2/Camera Trap Data/Analysis Files/camtrapR_PinValley_2016_Analysis",
+ metadataHierarchyDelimitor = "|", metadataSpeciesTag = "Species", removeDuplicateRecords = TRUE)

Bhar Ridgline  : 115 images
Warning: Bhar Ridgline  :  removed 101 records out of 115 because of missing species metadata tag
Chidang cliff  : 149 images
Warning: Chidang cliff  :  removed 123 records out of 149 because of missing species metadata tag
Choyam : 382 images
Error: stationChoyam:   metadataSpeciesTag 'Species' not found in image metadata tag 'HierarchicalSubject'.

[Aditya Malgaonkar]

solved the problem by creating a new directory without the folders with no detection .. that solved the problem.

Is there a way I can solve this problem without having to create another directory ?

[Juergen Niedballa]

Hi,
you are right. It looks as if stationChoyam contains images, but none of them has a 'Species' tag.

Here's an easy way out: you could assign a 'Species' tag like 'empty' to all images without a species record. These could then either be ignored by including them in argument 'exclude' of function recordTable (so they will not appear in the record table), or you manually remove them from the record table after running the function.
I would not recommend manually removing the directories that cause this problem, as I feel it is too error-prone and time-consuming.

I think the error is not really necessary here and can be downgraded to a warning, in effect skipping the station without breaking the function.
This will be changed in the next version. Thanks for the notification!
Best regards,
Jürgen

[Aditya Malgaonkar]

Thank You ! 

[Patricia Harveson]

Juergen:  I would like to have recordTable create a record for every photo, even those without a species tag.  Can I do this without creating a new tag Species:empty?  When I run it as is, I only get records for photos with a Species tag.

Thank you for your help.

Patricia

[Juergen Niedballa]

Hi Patricia,

currently this is not possible. All untagged images are automatically removed from the output table. I will add this feature to the to-do list. Thank you for the suggestion. In all honesty it might take a while though before I will find the time to implement it. 

Thank you for the suggestion and sorry I can't be of more help at the moment.

Jürgen

[Patricia Harveson]

The photos that do not have a "Species" hierarchical tag do have another tag "Empty".  Is it possible to select those files and easily apply a new tag such as "Species:None"?  I've tried this in Adobe Bridge but it only allows me to filter and select 1000 images at a time.  This would take a very long time doing it this way.  

[Juergen Niedballa]

It is not possible to change tags in or from camtrapR. You could try if it is possible in digiKam. Unfortunately I cannot test it at the moment.