Looking for feedback on my photo workflow automation tool

[jmathai]

Hello everyone,

I have been working on a photo, video and audio workflow automation tool for about 9 months. The program organizes media by date, location and user defined albums.

It originally relied on pyexiv2 and avmetareadwrite (OSX only). I finally refactored it to work entirely using ExifTool.

I wanted some feedback on the EXIF/XMP fields I've chosen, how they're used and the fallback rules.

Here is the project, named Elodie (after my daughter). https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

The EXIF/XMP tags used are listed in this table. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie#exif-and-xmp-tags

Any and all feedback is appreciated.

Jaisen

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jaisen,

Your table seems to use ExifTool nomenclature.  If so, then it should be EXIF:ModifyDate and EXIF:CreateDate instead of EXIF:DateTime and EXIF:DateTimeDigitized.  If not, then the references to Composite tags should be removed and you should instead reference the tags from which these are derived (see the Composite tags documentation).

For photo location you might also want to check XMP:GPSLatitude/Longitude, although these are less common than EXIF.

For XMP:Album the note says this is a user-defined tag?  Why not use the standard XMP-xmpDM:Album tag?

- Phil

Edit: Out of curiosity, what features are you talking about when you require version 10.15?

[jmathai]

Thanks Phil,

With regard to your comment about using EXIF:ModifyDate and EXIF:CreateDate; are those the fields I should be writing to despite the current ones also working?

Were your comments about the Composite tags related to the GPS ones listed?

I've added an issue to use XMP-xmpDM:Album.
https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/issues/119

Writing to MOV files wasn't supported by ExifTool 8.60. That's the version installed by apt-get on Ubuntu Precise. I did not track down the exact version of ExifTool which supported writing to MOV files and noticed plenty of changes in most versions related to that.

Code Select Expand

exiftool -ver
8.60

exiftool -config configs/ExifTool_config -XMP:Album="foo" video.mov
Error: Writing of MOV files is not yet supported - video.mov
    0 image files updated
    1 files weren't updated due to errors

Jaisen

[Phil Harvey]

With regard to your comment about using EXIF:ModifyDate and EXIF:CreateDate; are those the fields I should be writing to despite the current ones also working?

The other ones could not be working because they don't exist.

Were your comments about the Composite tags related to the GPS ones listed?

Yes.

Writing to MOV files wasn't supported by ExifTool 8.60. That's the version installed by apt-get on Ubuntu Precise. I did not track down the exact version of ExifTool which supported writing to MOV files and noticed plenty of changes in most versions related to that.

Code Select Expand

exiftool -ver
8.60

exiftool -config configs/ExifTool_config -XMP:Album="foo" video.mov
Error: Writing of MOV files is not yet supported - video.mov
    0 image files updated
    1 files weren't updated due to errors

This was added in version 9.40 back in 2013:

    Nov. 8, 2013 - Version 9.40 - "Write QuickTime"
      - Added ability to write XMP and edit date/time tags in QuickTime-format files
        (eg. MOV, MP4)


- Phil

[jmathai]

Thanks Phil,

There were various test failures even with version 9.40. These failed once I bumped the exiftool version to 10.20. I didn't look into the root cause of these since it seems directly related to versions of ExifTool; and running newer versions is easier than supporting older ones.

Here's the failed build.
https://travis-ci.org/jmathai/elodie/builds/140072842

I can look into the failures if it's useful for yourself.

Jaisen

[Phil Harvey]

No, don't worry about it.  I was just curious.  I don't think 10.20 should be necessary, but maybe it isn't worth the trouble trying to determine the minimum acceptable version number.

- Phil