It is absolutely possible to do what you want. The whole section "Using your metadata to make Piwigo more powerful" explains how you can modify Piwigo to use keywords.

I have reworded that paragraph to make it more clear.

Last edited by executive (2018-03-23 20:09:06)

Oh, the bit about use_iptc_mapping?  Haven't been able to make it work yet, but just starting out; I'm going to upload some new photos I'm sure have various things and see what gets picked up.  I did at least manage to get IPTC data *displayed*, which is a start. (Synchronize doesn't seem to work the way I think, or something, hence trying uploading some new photos for test purposes.  Early days, I'm used to thrashing around with new software :-) ).

Given the need for mapping to existing Piwigo fields -- where can I find a list of what Piwigo fields exist?  (At least the ones it could potentially be useful to map IPTC data into).

I still can't find a way to *search* on keywords in any case, though.  Also, what about IPTC fields I think of as "event", "location", "city", "state", and "country"? I see GPS fields but not not basic location, and most of my photos have traditional location fields and not GPS. 

(I'm working on some historical photo collections, I guess now for a non-profit rather than just on my own, and have somewhat similar needs to the original poster, though with the addition of location information.  I'm evaluating Piwigo and maybe some others, I haven't yet installed coppermine or zenphoto.)

Can I convert them to tags automatically on import and whenever resynchronization is run?  That might actually work.  I still want the search form to be much more specific, though (here and in zenphoto both).  I don't have *time* to start rewriting software!

Changing code is what i do for a living, though PHP isn't my primary tool much.  So doing a little fixing up is possibly on the agenda, if I decide that's the way to get what I want.

What I mean about the search form is I want to be able to specifically compare to the city field, or the state field, as well as text matching in any of a group of fields (which is *also* useful).  I don't want false positives from "Wyoming Knott" the person (fictional character, at least the one I'm thinking of) confusing a search for photos taken in Wyoming for example.  This kind of thing is more important IMHO in virtual albums defined by searches than in searches for human use, but of some consequence both ways.

Oh, and *dates* especially need to be handled separately, since you need to be able to search on inequalities (" before 1914 ", or "between 1970 and 1979").

Okay, I've missed a whole area of logic that can be applied to smart albums, it looks like.  Do you have to define the album first and then go back and refine it with filters, or something?  I don't remember seeing any such options on the path I took creating albums.

Okay, updating the exif and iptc fields used and how they map to database fields.  New fields get displayed with photos, but synchronize finds zero albums and zero photos, although there's an album with a couple of hundred photos I can browse through.  Does synchronize not find albums uploaded through the site, but only those uploaded with ftp, maybe?  I could try that I suppose, but the web site is the obvious way to upload files.

Will look at adding the code to turn location into labeled tags next, I guess, when I get this bit working (and play with filtering dynamic albums).

When I change the code to import new tags, it doesn't seem to synchronize old photos uploaded through the web portal, though (nor would I expect it to).  Is there no way to get that done?  Admittedly after the initial phases I'm unlikely to be updating the code every week, but every year or two maybe.