I wanted to set the IPTC value “description” of image files without using Photoshop, so I tried to use ‘sips’. Most of the images are TIFF and a mixture of PC and Mac byte order. When I try:
do shell script "sips -s description 'yadaayadaa' 'some/posix/path'"
PC TIFFs work fine but Mac TIFFs get scrambled.
OK, it is what it is. I guess I’m perplexed why there is no error when a Mac TIFF is processed and I can’t get a man page for ‘sips’ just ‘sips -h’ and ‘sips -H’. Why is that? When I read the two help screens, I see that ‘sips’ can modify the image or the profile of an image. But both the image and the profile have a property ,‘description’; the function to modify an image property is the same as the function to modify a profile property, ‘-s’. Does that mean that
sips -s description ‘xyx’ ‘some/posix/path’
could be both to edit the description in the IPTC data and could also be setting the description of a profile? There must be something truly fundamental I am missing.