Hi,

I’m currently running a ZenPhoto based Webpage, that I’m trying to re-setup with Piwigo as CMS. At the moment I’m struggling with one, from my point of view, important topic.

Background: I’m a plane spotter with my own webpage: spottair.de

On that page, I publish all my pictures. Because the collection grew quite big, I implemented a search functionality, that you can find directly on the home screen. For example, if you type “Emirates” (or even just “Emir”), you will see all my pictures from Emirates Airlines. Even use of boolean expressions in the search string is possible:

Example: “LHR AND 777” will show you all my Boeing 777 pictures, I took at London Heathrow Airport.

Technical background:  During picture development in Capture One or Lightroom, I add some metadata about the plane to the IPTC fields. These IPTC fields are used during import in Zenphoto, to build up a SQL database, which is searchable.
Stepping over to Piwigo, I managed to show IPTC data from my picture underneath the photo. Adding the metadata to the photo description also allows me, to search for certain pictures, like I do in ZenPhoto. Also, boolean expressions are allowed. Thanks here to the developers of Piwigo at this point.

E.g.: String in Photo description: “MUC BOEING 737-8F2 TC-JFE 1998-08-29 ANADOLUJET”

Search string: “BOEING AND 737” will find that picture.


But – and here comes my big problem: I have to fill in that photo description manually. I haven’t found a plugin, that automatically syncs the photo description fields with given (or specified) IPTC data fields. I’m not sure about the intended workflow with Piwigo, but as a photograph, I store and maintain my pictures, development info and metadata within Lightroom or Capture One. From my point of view, Photo CMS systems like Zenphoto or Piwigo should “just” import such data without the need of manually adaptions.

May be, I overlooked something or I’m missing a plugin. As far as I figured out, IPTC data as is, is not stored in the SQL database by Piwigo, with is quite confusing for me, because this is the workflow I would have expected from a photographic point of view.

May be, someone can provide some help at this point, because it seems, this is the only technical issue, that prevents me from switching over to Piwigo.

Thanks in advance,
Christian

PS: I'm running a Piwigo instance version 12.1.0 on a local XAMPP installation