[ANN} libEXIF v0.9

[Alex Tweedly]

At 11:48 15/12/2004 -1000, Sivakatirswami wrote:

>Aloha, from Hawaii, Alex:
>
>OK "ideas" here goes:
>
>I deal with digital images virtually *every* day of my life.. so this is 
>very interesting news.
>
>Do you know if the catalog information that is applied to images in 
>Photoshop CS is stored as EXIF metadata?

Yes, I believe it is. I don't have Photoshop CS, so I tested using 
Photoshop Elements - but I'd be surprised if they were very different.

It stores things like (as output by my Test button)

Image ,ImageDescription,This is the actual caption,ASCII,182
Image ,Software,Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0,ASCII,261
Image ,DateTime,2004:12:16 00:53:32,ASCII,290
      [ Note - it changed but left the DateTimeOriginal unchanged]
Image ,Artist,Alex Tweedly,ASCII,310
Image ,Copyright,(c) Eleane,ASCII,323
EXIF ,DateTimeOriginal,2004:10:18 09:50:39,ASCII,770

>An application we would be very interested in (and I think could be a 
>commercially viable product in the "real" world) would go like this: in a 
>real world scenario:
>
>Our photographer in Nepal (Thomas Kelly, as somewhat famous photographer 
>who also does assignments in Nepal and India for Hinduism Today") goes on 
>a photo shoot of some particular event. Like most photographers, he will 
>take even up to 500 shots in a 3 day period.... But for the article that 
>will use them in the next issue of the
>magazine, we only need perhaps 8 of them.

Does he really individually catalog all 500 of them ?
Or is there some batch process in PSCS to apply the same File Info to all 
of them ?  (PS Elements has some batch process methods, but I don't see one 
to apply "File / File info"

>Enter Revolution: We make a stand alone application for Thomas.. He works 
>in Photoshop... enters his captions, then we have Revolution 
>stack  "reads" all the photos into an external substack which creates 
>lo-resolution 2 X 3 inch thumbnails., but the metadata from the photoshop 
>info (which I hope is EXIF) is read into a field below the photo... he 
>clicks a button, the substack is saved, compressed and sent FTP to us 
>here... our editors review all the images, and the can read the captions, 
>the respond to him saying "We want these 8 shots"  then opens his 
>revolution stack and clicks on a list of chosing those 8 images, these are 
>in turn compressed and sent to use by FTP.. but the EXIF data somehow 
>accomanies them. When the photos actually go into InDesign... the editor 
>can pull out the EXIF data for the captions.

I hate to talk myself out of an app to write - but you can do almost all of 
that in PS already.

Add the FIle / File Info.
Use Batch Process to resize them all (to say 200 pixels width, low res) - 
this retains the Exif data from the captioning.
FTP the directory  to the editor

editor looks at the thumbnails - Exif data is available in PS
selects the filename of the ones he wants full-size copies of

FTP the full size images of the selected photos
Exif data is still in these full-size jpg files.

No need for any new manipulations of Exif data; you could have a small Rev 
app to display thumbnails and Exif data.

>right now I have a small application working for remote photographers, but 
>the caption info is external to the image... when they ship to us here... 
>(usually by email) I get
>
>01someImage.jpg
>01SomeImage.txt  # this being the caption
>
>But, there are challenges with this system.. what if someone renames the 
>image later ..etc.  files get separated... in some contexts i don't want 
>any text files in the working directory...etc. It would be much better if 
>there was a way to for the photographer to "insert" this metadata into the 
>photo file itself, so that it could piggyback along with the files as a 
>single entity.

Look into the "File / File info" command in PS - allows you to set Title, 
Author, Copyright status and copyright string, and Caption (unlimited 
length text string).

>We work with lots of photographers, both high end and lo end... and I 
>don't see any of them with these kinds of functional tools. There could be 
>a niche market for some application along these lines.

-- Alex.