ISO Country Codes for the IMatch Thesaurus

[Mario]

ISO 3166 Country Codes

XMP and IPTC allow you to input country codes and names into various fields - see the XMP and IPTC standard documents for details.
To save typing you can add these country codes and names to your IMatch Thesaurus once and then just select them from the drop-down lists in the Metadata Panel.

Manually Adding Elements to the Thesaurus

When you work in the Metadata Panel, you can add new elements to the thesaurus with the <F6> key.  Just type the text you want to add to the thesaurus for the corresponding metadata tag and press <F6>. Alternatively, choose the Add to Thesaurus command from the drop-down menu.



This allows you to add frequently used country codes and country names to your thesaurus.


Importing Country Codes and Names

If you want to pre-fill the thesaurus with country codes and names, you can use the following procedure:

1. Include the county code and country name tags you want to fill in one of your Metadata Panel layouts.

2. Enter a value and press F6. This creates the initial element in the thesaurus and makes the metadata tag available in the thesaurus.

3. Open the Thesaurus Manager. In the drop-down list at the top, select the metadata tag you want to edit.
Delete the temporary entry created in step 2. Select the entry node (top-level node) and choose Add new sub-element from the menu or press <Ins>.



4. Copy and paste the list you want to add from the attachments below into the input field in the dialog.
The lists use semicolons to separate entries. The Thesaurus Manager recognizes this separator and converts the list into individual entries automatically.



The final result in the Thesaurus Manager.



Below you'll find a ZIP attachment with individual text documents for 2 and 3 letter country codes plus long country names.

To use these lists, extract the contents of the ZIP file into a folder on your computer.
Open the list you want to use in Windows Notepad. Select the entire list with <Ctrl>+<A> and copy it into the Windows clipboard with <Ctrl>+<C>.
Finally paste it into the input field of the Add new sub-elements dialog box as shown in step 4. above.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Ferdinand]

In IMatch 3.6 in the IPTC editor, there was a link between the country name and the three letter country code.  If you entered one then the other was filled in automatically.  It is possible to create a link like this in IMatch 5, perhaps using synonyms (which I don't fully understand)?  I'm not asking to be told how - just that it's possible.

[Mario]

This was a hard-coded functionality in the IPTC editor. The thesaurus does not support such "links" between different metadata tags.

Unless a user works with files from many different country, it is usually easy to just enter both values in the Metadata Panel.
Or a Metadata Template can do the job to fill in both tags, and maybe some additional tags.
The data can also be filled in automatically via a GPS Location or the GeoNames app.

I made this FAQ to allow users who want country lists to just import them. And I wanted to highlight the easily missed functionality in the thesaurus to comfortably produce any number of sub-elements from semicolon-separated value lists. This method works well for other kinds of data like NewsCodes, keywords and other value lists available from organizations on the web.