Settings & Custom Rules

Application Settings

Settings Tab

See screenshot for the Settings Tab below

• Startup Folder: The folder in which the app should start. When new-install the default is "Pictures"
• ARCGIS API Key: As it says on the tin. There's a link in the Form to get one, it's free. This is needed if you want to use the Search function.
• GeoNames Username & Password: Again as it says on the tin. Follow the link on the Form to get one. For the TextBox itself do not use your email address but just the username. I've been told that by default the API usage is disabled for (some?) new accounts. In that case you have to activate the free web service ---> After registering and clicking the link in the activation email, you still need to activate your account for using web services. To do so, go to your "Manage Account" page [ http://www.geonames.org/manageaccount ] make sure your email shows up correctly. From here, click the "Free Webservice" activation link.
• Language: Pick your language and restart the app. Translations are kept in CSV files and the coding logic is that if a particular string does not exist in a particular language then the fallback is English - so you may see some English stuff even if you pick a different language.
• Set map to 0/0: Default is off -> when turned on the map will reset to the coordinates (0,0) when the user clicks on a file w/o coordinates. Generally not recommended.
• Remove TZ when removing geodata: the app has a "remove geodata" function, amongst others. TimeZone Offset can be removed as part of this process or the user can choose to keep that information.
• Show "this many" / "in the radius": these control the number of options a user is presented when pulling toponymy data. Generally the logic is that the app runs a search in ~10km radius from the given coordinates and if finds nothing then does another one in ~300kms but this setting overrides that logic. As for the "how many" if you default to 1 then you won't be presented with a set of nearby options, otherwise you will.
• Replace blanks: this was a user-request. The idea here is that empty/blank/null values can be replaced with a user-defined string if needed as it's useful for some workflows to be able to tag blanks.

File Options Tab

See screenshot for the File Options Tab below

For each of the file extensions the user can control behaviour. Defaults are somewhat different for RAW-types and non-RAW-types (say JPGs amongst others)

• Process the image itself: this is whether to change the image file or not - the logic is that for RAW files there is an option to save data into XMP sidecar files (see below). If the process the image is disabled then the RAW file itself won't be modified but the XMP only (assuming that setting is on. If both are off an error message will fire upon trying to save).
• Reset Image Date to Create DT: whether to change the file date to match the Create DateTime tag of the exif info.
• Add/overwrite XMP: this is mostly used in Adobe workflows but defaults to on for RAW files.
• Do Not Make Backups: exiftool can back up the modified files - when this is enabled, saving data will overwrite the original files.

Custom Rules Tab

See screenshot for the Custom Rules Tab below (the Greater London logic isn't part of the default setup but I included it so stuff makes a little more sense hopefully)

Custom Rules are, as the note says an advanced feature and is very much experimental and is available 20230107 onwards (possibly in the development tree only for the time being). I'd generally advise against using them as they incur a performance hit. As for what counts as a "predetermined" country have a read at this post. The TLDR is that you likely want to have that setting unchecked (which is the default).

The usage is that every dropdown must have a value as well as the textbox in the middle (which is Greater London on the screenshot). In addition if you pick Custom for becomes then the Custom Outcome must also have a value else it will be discarded.

In this particular case the user is expected not to be a derp. If you set something like Contains and then a single letter or something, that will apply as so. Keep it sensible therefore. Settings are per country and per "then" (that is, City/State/Sub_location) - refer to the screenshot. Rows are processed (I think, but not 100% sure as it's using an IEnumerable and it says a lot of my lack of knowledge that I don't know what flow that uses) in order so the latter rows overwrite the prior ones. The checkbox about "stop processing rules" controls this function. Referring to the screenshot, if there was a hypothetical third row, which would be the same as the second row except say Becomes = Custom and then Custom Outcome = Derp then:

• if the "stop processing rules" is checked then the actual result in an image tag would be say "Blackwall" (that's an actual sub_location within London, a real one, that would be otherwise stored in ToponymName) because a rule has been met and further identical combinations are ignored.
• if the above checkbox is unchecked then however the output would be Derp - because rule processing would continue indefinitely.

One thing to note here is that it's extremely unlikely that I'd add more advanced features to Custom Rules (say an AND/OR logic) because it becomes very complicated very quickly.