Picasa: Add Filename Captions Automatically

Ever wanted Picasa captions based on image filenames? Well, here comes a solution.

When adding pictures to Picasa, Picasa scans the pictures for meta information based on IPTC-NAA, a standard for attributing text, images and other media with meta information such as captions, copyright, etc. When Picasa encounters a file with attribute IPTC.Caption set it uses the value of the attribute as default caption.

I've come up with a litte ruby script captionize.rb to set the caption attribute to a bunch of images found inside a directory. The caption set is the filename (including the file extension) of the image.

The script requires a valid ruby installation and Exiv2 in your path to modify the meta content of an image.