Picture Picture On my Computer, Can You Tell Me What You Are?

This post will contain several tools that I use on occasion. On of my hobbies is taking pictures, mostly of animals.bugs and unusual events that occur around me. I use a digital camera with a 64 MB Secure Digital Card. The camera I use is not important, since I will be upgrading to another soon, and I do not want to advertise any particular camera. If you want reviews of digital Cameras then I recommend dpReview. My point through all this rambling is that it might be weeks before i am able to download the pictures from my camera into my PC. At my age I can have a hard time determining when or where I took the picture, especially if I have zoomed into a subject the full 8X optical that is offered by my camera. So I have assembled a toolkit that will allow me to figure out at least when I took a picture, and then i can usually figure out what the subject matter is, and why I took the picture. When I was a teenager my grandfather was a massive shutterbug, and always carried a notebook to jot down the subject, and time of the picture, now adays if you set up your camera it will take care of this for you.

All cameras use a sightly modified JPEG format call EXIF. All EXIF files can be opened by any image viewer that will open a JPEG image. Exif web sites are all over the place now adays, but when I statred using this informaiton I had to write my own tools. Some websites that EXIF are located here, and of course wikipedia has a page devoted to this format as well. One of the entries in this extra information that is stored with the JPEG compressed is teh time and date when the picture was taken, the camera model that was used to take the pictures, the ISO speed or shutter speed used to capture the image, and digital or optical zoom, and the actual image size in pixels. Some cameras will also record the geoLocation; i.e. the GPS position when the picture was snapped!!

On to the tools !!! Exif-o-matic is a java tool I use when I want to look at the information in a bunch of images with an actual GUI. I know this toll is not open source, but they have a freeware license, and then really neat part is that this app will export the EXIF information as either a text or HTML file, so you can actually use a desktop search utility to keep track of your images. That is why i place all the descriptions from this application into a single directory, and then use Copernic Desktop Search to keep track of this directory.

The next tool is called Album Shaper, and this tool is completely open source and has several tools called Presenter, Reveal as well as Album Shaper. Each tool has a specific purpose: here is a quote from the web site describing the tools

Presenter is an OpenGL-based slideshow viewer with limited support for viewing details of how photos were taken. Numerous 3D and 2D transition effects are provided in this sleek cut down app.
Reveal is an easy to use, cross platform EXIF metadata viewer with limited editing capabilities. Reveal was designed to present as many details about how a photo was taken in a clear and easy to understand format.
Album Shaper strives to be the most friendly, easy to use, open source application for organizing, annotating, framing, enhancing, stylizing, and sharing your digital photos. Album Shaper embraces open formats like XML, JPEG, and XSLT, while supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix users who speak a multitude of languages around the world.

This next tool, ExifTool, that I use is a command line Perl tool, and there is an exe that requires no installation. You simply copy the tool to a directory to use. When you download the exe, and double click it the command window will open and describe how to use this application. The main reason that I use this tool, is that I can automatically take information from the EXIF information in the picture, and change the title of the saved image in accordance with the Date, Time or other criteria that the camera records, instead of the meaningless IMG0000X that my cameras software currently uses. What is special about this tool is that it also understands RAW image formats from various cameras. If you are NOT comfortable using the command window in Windows, or do not use scripting then you can use the Drag and Drop interface that the author was so very kind in implementing for those Windows users who are challenged with a window in which we actually type commands, like in the DOS days !!!

The last tool JHead that I use is also a command line utility, but this tool allows even more powerful options. This java powerhouse is a standalone exe with no drag and drop interface, so you have to use scripting or a command window !! This application will allow you to change the EXIF information in the JPEG file, and will automatically rename a file according to the Date in the EXIF information instead of the standard IMG or DSC etc etc. So in-combination with a recursive directory walker this tool will allow you perform many many operations of the image, even rotate, and further perform another operation on the image as well. One time I even used a cascade operation where I took all the jpg version of my photos and edited the comment section of the images so that I could send the images to another person, and not have to write a little note with each image, and have to save the note as a separate text file with the image. This application allowed me to simply add the comment to the image file, so that the other person on the project could figure out what the image was supposed to be about. There are command line options to insert strings into the comment fields of the EXIF section of the image.