Pulling EXIF info for signatures?

[mnealtx]

Hello all,

First off, let me say that I've done a search and not found anything.

With that said, here is my question:

Are there any tutorials or information on how to pull EXIF info for use in signatures? I've seen the thread on the framing program, but would like to be able to do it myself, to add selected info into my captures.

[tim]

Google "Mike's Framer", it's a cheap (formerly free) utility that will put EXIF info into the image. That's different from a signature, which on a forum usually refers to the stuff where you have "Mike" and your gear listed.

[328iGuy]

I second the idea of Mike's Framer, best $11 I have spent in a long while! :cool:

[malcolmp]

Buy a utility if you can. Getting the exif data from images is not as easy as you would think -- or at least as I thought it would be.

The brute force way is low-level byte access with a "dictionary" of what the tags mean. If you are using .Net then you can use the GDI+ library to access metadata (e.g. see this codeproject (http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/photoproperties.asp) article) but you still need a dictionary to interpret what each tag means, including vendor-specific tags. There are a number of libraries with source code if you really want to code it yourself, here's a link if you know java/C++/C# (http://www.drewnoakes.com/code/exif/).

$11 sounds like a good deal :-)

Malcolm

[mnealtx]

Thanks everyone, for the replies.

Is it possible to use Mike's Framer to JUST pull/insert the EXIF info and not do the framing? I didn't look at it all that closely, because I thought it was primarily a framing program...

[malcolmp]

If you just want to dump the exifs there are a number of utilities, some freeware. Just google "extract exif" and you will get a few to choose from. e.g. this one (http://www.br-software.com/extracter.html). I've tried a couple on the Mac buy not my PC yet.

Malcolm

[malcolmp]

Just to follow up, I think Exifer (http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/) is probably the best at extracting a large set of exif data. How you want to insert them into a sig is another question. You could probably do it using AppleScript on a Mac, I'm not sure the best way to script this on Windows.

Malcolm

[mickle]

Thanks everyone, for the replies.

Is it possible to use Mike's Framer to JUST pull/insert the EXIF info and not do the framing? I didn't look at it all that closely, because I thought it was primarily a framing program...

You can enable/disable the frames, mattes, resizing, USM, signature, title, exif info, flattening, DPI etc etc....

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v440/mickleuk/newframer.jpg