Appreciating Exif

(brentfitzgerald.com)

41 points | by burnto 3 days ago

3 comments

  • 9dev 33 minutes ago
    Wrote a parser to extract image metadata once, and got massively frustrated with the amount of undocumented, semi-documented, wrongly documented, or partially documented attributes. You’ll find references online, but most of them lack half of what you encounter in images. Every image processing app under the sun adds its own range. Some use metric values, some imperial; finding out which can be guesswork. Aperture is given in f-stops, decimals, or literal fraction strings. Some attributes hold sentinel values. Some vendors have custom conventions for undefined data.

    It’s a jungle out there.

  • AndrewStephens 57 minutes ago
    Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.

    In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.

    • sigwinch28 25 minutes ago
      Conversely, as a hobbyist photographer, I want to do the exact opposite for most photos I take.

      I would like my camera info, especially the body, lens, focal length, and settings in the image. I recently discovered that software like Darktable can even take a gpx file and photo timestamps to add coordinates to photos taken on a camera without a GNSS receiver.

      • Avamander 20 minutes ago
        Yup. Looking back I wish I had location data on some of the photos I took. Can't share them but can't also remember where I took them. Unfortunate.
  • koryanders 8 minutes ago
    [flagged]