EXIF editor you could recommend

It would be cool if TapForms would provide access to the exif data. This could be done by using Phil Harvey’x ExifTool.

It looks like NSImageEXIFData is only available on macOS.

I actually already have code to fetch the EXIF data from an image at a URL:

+ (NSDictionary *)getExifDataFromImageUrl:(NSURL *)url {
	
	NSDictionary *exifData = nil;
	
	CGImageSourceRef mySourceRef = CGImageSourceCreateWithURL((__bridge CFURLRef)url, NULL);
	if (mySourceRef != NULL) {
		NSDictionary *myMetadata = (__bridge NSDictionary *)CGImageSourceCopyPropertiesAtIndex(mySourceRef,0,NULL);
		exifData = [myMetadata objectForKey:(NSString *)kCGImagePropertyExifDictionary];
	}
	
	return exifData;
}

Perhaps I could expose it to the scripting engine.

I use this method to get the photo’s timestamp so when you export the photos, Tap Forms can set the file’s creation date to the photo’s original date/time value.

That’s an interesting approach, I didn’t think of a full export cycle, I was trying to get at it via scripting. That gets me thinking about leveraging something outside the ecosystem.

I’d probably lean on CouchDB and use that to watch it’s change log and then each time a record with an image is added, process it in something I’m comfortable in (generally PHP) and then just have that rewrite the entry in CouchDB. If I needed it to be responsive, I’d probably set a smaller timeout and try to wait for a quiet period on the record (older than five minutes?) before triggering the update so as to not be too disruptive and create conflicts. It could be an overnight thing so that it minimises the risk of conflicts as well but that experience wise isn’t great. Now I’m riffing maybe even have a script trigger to extract the record, process the data and hand it back to Tap Forms then have TF handle updating the record so at least the users TF document is consistent and the writes are generally going in one direction.

Fun problem to solve :)