Fill AutoFill Templates using the Copy Data App

This article describes how you can use the Copy Data app included in IMatch to fill AutoFill templates from existing metadata in your files.

How to Use the Clipboard with the AutoFill Template Editor

You can paste data into an AutoFill template from the Windows clipboard. The data in the clipboard must have the same number of columns as the AutoFill template and the columns must be separated with a tabulator character (09h) and the clipboard can contain any number of rows.
This easy method of transferring data into an AutoFill template is designed to copy data from other applications, like spreadsheets or databases.

The following AutoFill template contains two tags (columns) for the Copyright and Copyright URL metadata tags:

If the clipboard contains text data with two tab-separated columns per row and any number of rows, we can paste the clipboard contents directly into this AutoFill template. For example:

(C) Mario M. Westphal[tab]https://www.photools.com
(C) Paul P. Photographer[tab]https://www.example.org

The [tab] token symbolizes the actual tabulator character in this case. After pasting the clipboard contents, the AutoFill template looks like this:

How to Fill AutoFill Templates from Existing Metadata in Files

We can utilize the clipboard support of IMatch AutoFill to quickly add data to AutoFill templates. For this, we use the metadata already contained in files and the free Copy Data app included in IMatch.

The Copy Data app is a simple yet powerful tool that can copy arbitrary metadata and attributes into the Windows clipboard. You specify what to copy using a mix of free text and IMatch Variables, which also allows you to transform and format the data as needed before it is copied into the clipboard.

For this example, we setup the Copy Data app to copy the values of two tags: the Copyright and the Copyright URL tags.
(The special [tab] token tells the app to copy a regular tab character (09h) into the clipboard).

When we now select a file that contains data in the Copyright and Copyright URL tags we want to add to an AutoFill template, we just click the green Copy Data button and then paste the clipboard contents into your AutoFill template afterwards.

Copy Data From Any Number of Files!

This means we can select several files which contain variations of the data we want to use in an AutoFill template, click Copy Data once and then paste into an AutoFill template in one go. This produces as many rows in the template as there are files selected.

Format and Transform When Needed

Since Copy Data utilizes IMatch Variables, we can transform or format the metadata data contained in the files before copying it into the Windows clipboard. Maybe use the default function to fill in a default text when a file contains no data for a tag or replace characters as needed with the replace function.

Thanks to the power of IMatch variables, there are virtually no limits of what Copy Data can do. Not just for AutoFill, but also for all other situations where you want to transfer data from IMatch to other applications.