Write support for FLIR JPEG Meta Information

[Dewald]

Hi,

Firstly, thank you for this awesome piece of software!

Not sure which topic I should place this under - I closest topic I could think of is "Feature Request"...

I tried to set one of the metadata items in a FLIR radiometric jpg like so:

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exiftool img.jpg -PaletteName="abc"

And then get the message:

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Warning: Sorry, PaletteName is not writable

From the docs I've read I understand it is because write support for FLIR has not been implemented yet. I'm currently busy with a project that desperately needs this functionality.  I see we have access to the source and have fairly good programming experience. Is it viable for me to try implement it myself?

Is this a big undertaking?
Any pointers on where in the code to start or what functions to look at?
Do I only need to edit the "FLIR.pm" file?

Best Regards,
Dewald

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Dewald,

Just adding the ability to change existing FLIR information wouldn't be too difficult.  But adding the ability to create new FLIR records would be a problem.

To just change existing information, you could just modify ProcessFLIR to also do the writing in a similar way to what was done with ProcessPNG.  FLIR is a bit different though, because it may exist as a stand-alone file, or as a record in a JPEG file, so it must be added to both the WriteInfo() routine and WriteJPEG().

But it will be a lot of work to do this properly.

- Phil

[Dewald]

Hi Phil,

Thank you for the quick and informative answer! 

But adding the ability to create new FLIR records would be a problem.

With "create" do you mean that if I create a new meta data value which did not exist before? (like below)

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exiftool img.jpg -Meas1Type="Spot"

Best Regards,
Dewald

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Dewald,

With "create" do you mean that if I create a new meta data value which did not exist before? (like below)

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exiftool img.jpg -Meas1Type="Spot"

This would be the command, but the Meas1Type tag would only need to be created if it didn't exist before.  ie) if this command didn't return anything:

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exiftool img.jpg -meas1type

Editing existing tags in a file is much easier than creating new ones.

- Phil