[ANN} libEXIF v0.9

[Alex Tweedly]

At 17:29 15/12/2004 +0000, Ben Rubinstein wrote:
>Alex,
>
>This is excellent.
>
>Do you have any plans to advance it in the direction of writing EXIF data?

Plans ?   No.
Ideas ?  Yes

Overall plan is
  - add some Makernote extraction
  - fix bugs
  - write the app that got me started on this path
  - fix bugs
  - think about modifying and/or writing Exif data.

I do intend to experiment a bit with writing the Exif data for a couple of 
specific purposes.

1. My favourite photo editor loses all Exif data  (it's an old version of 
PicturePublisher). Newer version retain the Exif data, but they come in two 
versions - professional which is out of my price range, and consumer  which 
lacks the feature that makes it my favourite :-)
So I'm thinking of simply copying all Exif data from one file into another 
one which doesn't already have any - might be simple though I need to 
figure out how much of the data becomes incorrect.
But at the same time, I'm using both GIMP and PS Elements, and getting used 
to them - so this need might disappear before I get to it.

2. My camera (Pentax *ist D) produces a 56K byte Makernote data section. 
Not an issue in my 2-3 Mbyte photos, but when I crop and compress it to put 
on the web, I can easily finish up with files that are 100K in size - with 
over 50% being "wasted".

3. Camera thumbnails. Many cameras embed a thumbnail in the JPEG they 
produce (they use it for the thumbnail view on -camera). It's typically 
never used again after the photo is uploaded, but can hang around 
indefinitely (more "wasted" space).

It would be generally easy to modify existing data (just overwrite the 
existing field), but trickier to add (or delete) data. Do you have any 
particular purpose in mind ?  Any specific ideas for what you'd like to write ?

-- Alex.