How do I preserve commas when exporting metadata from Lightroom to csv?

Question

I am using LR/Transporter to export metadata from Lightroom to a .csv file. For the most part this works flawlessly. However, if I have a comma in the Caption field anything after that comma gets bumped to the next column.

For the Keywords field their is a modification option that coverts commas to a semicolon or other character. To do that you do this:

{keywordTags[;]}

I attempted using the a modification similar to that for the caption:

{caption[;]}

Unfortunately this does not work. Is there something else I can do to preserve the normal use of commas in the caption field?

My goal is to be able to export the contents of night fields from Lightroom to a .csv file and retain the integrity of the data.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Instead of creating a Comma Separated file LR/Transporter will output a Tab Delimited file which will preserve your commas and make importing the data much cleaner.

If you really need a CSV file you can easily make or use a tool to do the conversion from Tabs to Commas that can preserve the commas.

Here is a good post about the trouble with the CSV format and workarounds for different use-cases. https://stackoverflow.com/q/4025831/210570

P.S. Using the Lightroom 5 Beta, LR/Transporter is not adding carrige returns at the end of each photos metadata. To get around this I am using a text editor to replace the "\n" with a carriage return so that Excel may properly import the file.

The Head: Caption{tab}Keywords\n

The text for each photo: {caption}{tab}{keywordTagsForExport}\n

Answer 2

My apologies to Dave, who provided a solid response to the question, however, not satisfied with a work-around, I continued searching. Thanks to some very kind advice from Rob Cole I was led to find: ListView by John Beardsworth. This is the Swiss Army Knife of Metadata export. My only regret is that I didn't find it sooner. It can export any and all metadata to Excel or .csv. Excellent solution.

Answer 3

A proper export to CSV should wrap any content with a , within it in a string identifier or string wrapper. Check if there is an option to add string wrappers. Normally they would be double quotes ("), but often in good CSV output engines, they will allow you to specify the value to use. If you can't find such an option, then it is likely a bug that will need to be fixed by the developer as there is no way to tell which commas are content and which are separators after the fact (unless you are able to change the separator to something that isn't , (at which point it technically isn't a CSV file anymore.