jmoiron.net

I spent most of today investigating different ways to read EXIF data in Python for the up and coming gallery. A few days ago, as noted elsewhere, I spent a day investigating Mono and writing trivially simple GUI applications in boo. These were kind of liesurely activities, but their usage was immediately relevant to anyone.. even a non-coder. When my images are immediately available to everyone along with the ISO setting, shutter speed, and timestamp, normal people will understand. When I show my parents GUI apps that I have written, they understand its uses.

The complexity of programming is shifting from technical complexity to a more user-centric complexity. I spent more than half of today looking at different existing image gallery software and image gallery presentations. Some css only galleries are actually quite impressive. After quite some time, I finally got something working and grabbing exif data from photos taken from various cameras. Figuring out how exactly to present this (What should I cache, and how? What will I do as far as thumbnailing, fixing orientation, etc?) is going to take quite some time yet; at least some number of weeks.

Speaking to amit about this this evening, he came up (independently) with the same idea that Ceache and I had been kicking around ever since he got his SLR: combine GPS data w/ pictures and integrate a google maps mashup into your gallery. As more and more complex and useful API's are made public and available, the hard part is increasingly knowing what is out there and what you need to leverage them, and not really writing the program.

In the end, PIL did what I wanted but was missing a few vital pieces of information from the vendor specific tags (notably, the ShutterSpeed and ISO number are MakerNote's for canon cameras), so I settled for using (and modifying slightly) EXIF.py. I was a bit disappointed not to find anything simple for using ImageMagick for python (I could have sworn I had seen it), but PIL looks like it does most of the things I will need for image manipulation.