Is there any tool to migrate Picasa video collection to Shotwell or any other Linux photo/video manager?

[Miguel]

Hi there,

I have a large collection of short home videos. The tags have been added manually by me and contain loads of valuable information. I need to export these videos WITH TAGS to some other photo/video manager (Shotwell or similar).

I have searched extensively, and I arrived to this site to be astonished about the many capabilities and features of Picasa Starter, but  yI cannot find an answer to this question. Perhaps one of your tools can do this job?

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem?

Thanks in advance!

[earlboss]

Hi Miguel:

What is the format of the videos you are trying to export? MP4? MOV? ...

For most image formats like JPG, Picasa writes user tags you enter in the tag panel (on the right side of the picasa main screen) to the image file.

For most (if not all) video formats, though, Picasa does not write the user tags to the video file, but instead writes the tags to the hidden file .Picasa.ini in the same folder as the video file.

You can look at this file using a text editor and you will see that any image file or video file will be listed along with any edits to the image, including tags.

The .picasa.ini hidden file is where picasa stores all information about the files in that folder.  When the edits are "Saved", thay are transferred to the image file if picasa knows how to do that, but picasa does not know how to save tags to a video file, so it leaves the tags in the .picasa.ini file.

I don't know how many videos you have, but one way to get the tags into the video file is using a tool like EXIFTool  https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ to manually write the tags one by one to the video files by reading them from the .ini file then using EXIFTool to write them to the video file metadata.

It might be possible to write a script or program to read the tags from the ini file and write them to the proper video file, but I don't have the ability to do that. Maybe someone in the EXIFTool forum knows of a way to do that.

Sorry,

Earl

[Miguel Aguilera]

Hi Earl,

Thank you very much for your answer. I did not know that there was a video file format that included metadata like tags. My videos are mostly mp4, but I think it is not possible to record tags within this video file.

I did not know either that EXIFTool is able to write tags to video files, I thought it was only for photos. I will explore this option.

In any case, manually typing each tag is not really feasible, I have more than 1000 videos and each has 5 or 6 tags, like events, people, places, etc.

I lack the knowledge to write scripts, but I will see if anyone has done anything similar and ask around.

Best regards,

Miguel

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