ExifTool for Trail Cameras!

[DanO]

Hi All,

Brand new to the forum and fairly new to the ExifTool application. A little background: I stumbled onto the tool when I was looking for a way to automatically ascertain information on the time and date of a large selection (~500) trail camera pictures. For those of you who don't know what that is, basically, as a deer hunter I set up cameras in high traffic areas in the woods that are motion activated. The camera allows me to monitor the wildlife without physically being present. It's not unusual for me to get hundreds of pictures a month, depending on a number of factors.

I'm also a somewhat obsessive data junky, so I keep detailed records of as much information from these pictures as possible. Eventually I got tired of doing a ton of manual data entry so I developed a really rough VBA-based interface to execute ExifTool on a selection of pictures, combine the data, and import into Excel.

Here's where my quandary comes in: I have no problem getting the date and time stamps out using the tool. It's very effective and I love it. However, the cameras that I use also have a thermocouple and pressure transducer, so they're able to record the temperature and barometric pressure at the time of the capture. I suspect this information is available because it's stamped on the image (same as date and time.) What I don't know is if the ExifTool in it's current capacity can access something like that? Otherwise, can my installation be modified or is there any other method of extracting this additional information?

Thanks ahead of time!! I'm going to attach a sample image and resulting ExifTool text file.
-Dan

[StarGeek]

It looks like that model doesn't have a built in GPS, but lets you enter the coordinates manually.  I would guess that Unknown 0x0000 is GPSVersionID,  Unknown 0x0001 and Unknown 0x0003 are GPSLatitudeRef and GPSLongitudeRef.  If you could check what the current gps coordinates on the camera currently are set to, that could help figure out if the other two unknowns are the gps coordinates.

[Phil Harvey]

Well that is just stupid.  It looks like the makernotes directory is just a standard GPS directory (although the lat/long values are a little odd).  Why they store it as makernotes instead is a complete mystery.  Here is a snippet from the -v3 output:

Code Select Expand

  | | | + [MakerNotes directory with 5 entries]
  | | | 0)  Unknown_0x0000 = 2 2 0 0
  | | |     - Tag 0x0000 (4 bytes, int8u[4]):
  | | |         036e: 02 02 00 00                                     [....]
  | | | 1)  Unknown_0x0001 = N
  | | |     - Tag 0x0001 (2 bytes, string[2]):
  | | |         037a: 4e 00                                           [N.]
  | | | 2)  Unknown_0x0002 = 0.25 0.2 0.1666666667 (1/4 1/5 1/6)
  | | |     - Tag 0x0002 (24 bytes, rational64u[3]):
  | | |         03ae: 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 05 [................]
  | | |         03be: 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 06                         [........]
  | | | 3)  Unknown_0x0003 = E
  | | |     - Tag 0x0003 (2 bytes, string[2]):
  | | |         0392: 45 00                                           [E.]
  | | | 4)  Unknown_0x0004 = 0.1428571429 5.937181415e-08 1 (1/7 1/16843009 16843009/16[snip]
  | | |     - Tag 0x0004 (24 bytes, rational64u[3]):
  | | |         03c6: 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 01 01 01 01 01 [................]
  | | |         03d6: 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01                         [........]

I don't think the temperature and pressure are stored in the metadata.  They are probably just encoded as text in the image -- I have seen that before with other makes.

- Phil

[DanO]

Ah, got it. That's unfortunate! Looks like manual data entry for me! Next time I buy a new trail camera I'll try to screen for MetaData availability.

Thanks for looking into it!