Problem with replacing faulty characters caused by some improper graphics plugin

Help & Support
1

Currently, i'm working over my photo collection, and came across some old sessions, where some plugin must have messed up tag names, replacing german special characters, namely ä,ü,ö,ß, by some strange chinese characters. I have tried several variations of rename pattern, but none of them worked so far. I had quite a lot of those faulty keywords corrected manually, but it turned out, that there are a lot more affected, and i would also have to correct them on another remote machine, in a backup of my collection. Therefore a button would come in handy, that can fix those misspellings. I guess, this is some kind of Unicode issue, and maybe there is another approach to get rid of those wrong characters. I must have used some plugin back then, and saving the images led to that side effect, i suppose. Maybe someone here has an idea?

Alternately, a script that would be able to find all non-standard characters (besides the Umlaute) would be helpful, since it's cumbersome to check hundreds of folders from that era.

Here's a sample of the findreps, that didn't work:

rename pattern "Bootsh䵳er" to "Bootshäuser" findrep
rename pattern "Caf鳀" to "Cafés" findrep
rename pattern "Str䵣her" to "Sträucher" findrep
rename pattern "䮫" to "äum" findrep
rename pattern "Gel䮤er" to "Geländer" findrep
rename pattern "Gr䳥r" to "Gräser" findrep

2

You probably just need to add NOMATCHNOFAIL to each of the lines, so if the first pattern doesn't match a file, the others are still tried:

rename pattern "Bootsh䵳er" to "Bootshäuser" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
rename pattern "Caf鳀" to "Cafés" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
rename pattern "Str䵣her" to "Sträucher" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
rename pattern "䮫" to "äum" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
rename pattern "Gel䮤er" to "Geländer" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
rename pattern "Gr䳥r" to "Gräser" findrep NOMATCHNOFAIL
3

Since these are tags, in which mode would i have to try it? Obviously, when only having the file selected, with the tags being visible in a column, that's not the way to do it, because the renam eworks on the file name here, not on the tags inside.

But trying the same with all tags selected inside the metadata panel isn't right either, because that's not where the rename is applied to.

Maybe it's not possible at the time?

grafik
grafik881×225 14.4 KB

4

i think you'd need a script for that, as the rename command won't edit tags.

(Rename can use tags in filenames, but can't change the tags themselves. The SetAttr META command can change tags, but doesn't have a search & replace mode.)

I haven't tried it for this particular thing, but this script might be what you need: DO Meta Wizard Command

5

That looks promising, thank you. I'll check it out later. It could also be useful otherwise.

6

From a quick test i can see, that it works! That's cool. But i have tested it only with single tag names so far. I will try to build a whole list of tags to be replaced (if possible), and make a preset. :beers:

1 Like