Handling EXIF data and other bits

While Mistral has been proving a little less than helpful with some areas, such as the move to Tumbleweed, presumably because it's training data is a little lacking in that area, it has been more helpful with less taxing coding problems and in the case of tidying the images from the camera's it actually provided an enhanced script with things I had been thinking about before I even asked! Still needs a little fine tuning, and some aspects are not in tune with Tumbleweed, or is that just Plasm6 desktop. But that is yet another thread!

The initial question was simple enough "What options do I have for editing the EXIF data on a set of images. In particular I need to change the Image Description from the identical 'SONY DSC' which appears on every image and then gets duplicated on the web upload."

I'd forgotten to add the target setup as I was on a new thread with the chat bot, so a Debian-based solution appeared, but being used to the differences again I could quickly check it out so discovered that the Debian package did not exist but exiftool already existed in my installing. Then correcting Mistral came up with a bash script rather than it's preferred python solution. This failed to run, but a quick check of things soon worked out why. The Sony camera uses .JPG rather than .jpg and while on windows this is the same thing, Linux is a little more picky and these result in two different files ... and fun in BeyondCompare when mirroring them to a windows machine. There are a number of other niggles in file names which throw windows, such as / and : which get used a lot in media metadata but which windows can't handle in the generated file names such as CD track files.

So a quick switch to .JPG in the script, and use the full directory name /home/lester/ rather than ~ and we have it working. Obviously the next step was to sanitise the extension, so .JPG is replaced by .jpg and we have a clean set of images for the Dalek project already to upload.

AT this point Mistral offered a more substantive script which switches the extension case if needed and a few other tweeks, but I have yet to digest all of it yet as I wanted to get the blog post uploaded first. A job for next week when I have a little time. In addition to the EXIF data, I need to tidy the metadata on the pdf files to save having to correct that once uploaded to calibre. Something else for the todo list.