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FYI: I just recently added simple Exif viewing/editing/clearing to my "xv"-inspired image editor pxv: https://github.com/linsomniac/pxv
My primary goal was to have my core "xv" muscle-memory usable through a simple tool that didn't require me building the original xv (since you can't just apt install it), because these days I'm not using xv much.
But I've since added a few features that xv doesn't have like the Exif and also image annotation, plus beefed up the image enhancement to be very much like XVs.
Wrote a parser to extract image metadata once, and got massively frustrated with the amount of undocumented, semi-documented, wrongly documented, or partially documented attributes. You’ll find references online, but most of them lack half of what you encounter in images. Every image processing app under the sun adds its own range. Some use metric values, some imperial; finding out which can be guesswork. Aperture is given in f-stops, decimals, or literal fraction strings. Some attributes hold sentinel values. Some vendors have custom conventions for undefined data.
It’s a jungle out there.
that sounds endlessly frustrating
Exif is technical debt in the most flattering sense. Messy, old, and still quietly useful decades later.
Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.
In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.
Conversely, as a hobbyist photographer, I want to do the exact opposite for most photos I take.
I would like my camera info, especially the body, lens, focal length, and settings in the image. I recently discovered that software like Darktable can even take a gpx file and photo timestamps to add coordinates to photos taken on a camera without a GNSS receiver.
Yup. Looking back I wish I had location data on some of the photos I took. Can't share them but can't also remember where I took them. Unfortunate.
Yes, as another privacy "aficionado" many years ago I had taken so many photos that I don't remember where I took, and I can't ask around either :'(
This why I have my phones track themselves (started with Moostrax on the Blackberry then iOS, Moves on iOS until Facebook killed it, now it's OwnTracks on iOS logging to my server + Arc Timeline + Gyroscope + some others, I think) - even without the "where was this photo taken?" helpfulness (for camera shots + phone shots with stripped location), it's also good for "where was that cafe / coffee shop / craft shop / whatever?" kind of questions (obviously assuming you can remember vaguely what date and time...)
I should get better at taking contemporaneous notes, really, but since that hasn't happened in 30+ years, I doubt it's going to stick now.