EXIF writer

I'm pulling photos out of SDE, collected by Collector/AGOL and writing out jpeg images. I would really like to include exif info on the output so the photos could be used by other applications in the future. At the moment the jpeg photos that are written are dumb.

Good idea, but as EXIF is meta data, a separate writer doesn't make much sense as such.

I think it would be better to insert EXIF as a "Styler", which adds exif attributes to the features, which the relevant writers (JPEG, PNG et.al.) will recognize.

Just my humble opinion :-)

Hi @annette2, @lifalin2016 and @famjpdenboer,

Writing EXIF tags now available in FME 2018.0 Betas (Build 18254+)

This means any JPEG read into FME containing EXIF tags can be written back out to JPEG without losing the EXIF tags. To do this, add a new JPEG writer to the canvas ensure that Write to EXIF Tags is set to Yes.

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If you are using an older workspace, you will need to add a new JPEG writer (not just update), this is to ensure that existing JPEG writer settings aren’t overwritten with the upgrade.

FME supports most of the available EXIF Tags, this website lists all EXIF tags. If there is a EXIF tag that isn't supported in FME, please add a comment to this idea indicating which tag you would like support for.

You can also add EXIF tags to any raster format being written out to JPEG by using an AttributeCreator and creating the EXIF tags you would like to add. Add jpeg_exif_ before any of the EXIF tag types and then manually set the attribute data. Example attributes:

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@lizsanderson Is there a list of the EXIF fields that FME can currently write to? If not can you please provide one in this thread?

I need to be able to write field inspection attributes for my purposes the most basic needs are:

XPTitle, XPSubject, XPComment, XPAuthor, XPKeywords, ImageDescription, DateTimeOriginal,GPSLongitude,GPSLatitude,GPSLatitudeRef,GPSLongitudeRef

I assumed that these fields would be incorporated into the writer as essential, however testing it out I'm finding that these values are not being written.

I'm working with images captured via Esri's AGOL Collector (like the example workflow in the above comment by @annette2), my images are of field inspections/evaluations of burned trees and damaged infrastructure. A lot of data has been collected in ArcGIS however it is important that this data be incorporated into the inspection images to ensure that as images are shared between staff and the public they don't lose their supporting data.

The above EXIF field names were retrieved from here:

https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/EXIF.html

https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/GPS.html

Thank you!

Hi Joshua,

You can find all of those attributes in the JPEG documentation, the format for each of those would be jpeg_exif_xptitle where you would replace xptitle with each of the attributes you are interested in writing.

Hope that helps,

-Liz

@lizsanderson Thank you for the link!

I learned that the EXIF tags are required to be all lowercase letters... now that I know that its all good.

Has anyone gotten this to work? @lizatsafe​ 

I am trying to overwrite the xptitle tag on a jpg file but it is coming out blank in windows. I am guessing it has something to do with the encoding:

This is the value on the feature I am writing:

The writer sees the value just fine:However, after the file is written, the title shows blank when the properties are accessed in Windows:

But then, when the written file is opened in FME inspector, the value shows properly. However, the encoding shows as windows-1250.

I've tried AttributeEncoder to force it to utf-8 but it still does not show in windows.