[ANN} libEXIF v0.9

[Sivakatirswami]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sannyasin Sivakatirswami
Himalayan Academy Publications
at Kauai's Hindu Monastery
katir at hindu.org

www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
www.HinduismToday.com
www.Gurudeva.org
www.Hindu.org

On Dec 15, 2004, at 8:57 AM, Pierre Sahores wrote:

> Thanks a lot Alex for this ! I forward directly your announcement to 
> Pr François Jouen witch could be interested in testing it.
>
> Kind Regards, Pierre
>
> Le 15 déc. 04, à 15:20, Alex Tweedly a écrit :
>
>> EXIF Extraction library.
>>
>> EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format, the format used to 
>> store interchange information in photo files, particularly JPEGs 
>> though it is also used in TIFFs.  Most digital cameras now include 
>> EXIF information.
>>
>> I've put the first (let's call it alpha :-) version of my EXIF 
>> extraction library up on RevOnline. (category Programming, or under 
>> my username alextweedly).
>>
>> The stack is intended to be used as a library, but it  includes a 
>> "Test" button to try it out on your own photo files, and an "Info & 
>> help" button which will (some day) give real documentation. See the 
>> script under "Test" button for the essentials.
>>
>> It can extract much of the EXIF information included in JPEG and TIFF 
>> files. I don't yet decode manufacturer specific "Makernote" info - I 
>> have the necessary information for a few manufacturers ready to code 
>> - but don't yet have it for Pentax *ist D (i.e. my own camera !!), so 
>> that's not top of the priority list.
>>
>> I've tested it on a few hundred photos, from probably 20 different 
>> cameras - so I'm sure there are more crufty variations that it hasn't 
>> yet been tested against. I'd be grateful for any reports of 
>> misbehaviour or problems.
>>
>> Now that I actually have something I think is worth sharing, I'll go 
>> start on my RunRev web page.
>>
>> Thanks
>> -- Alex.
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-revolution mailing list
>> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>>
> -- 
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