SmugShot Metadata Mess

SmugShot iPhone App Logo

While languishing in a series of hospitals and rehab centers recovering from a bad fall I have been amusing myself by taking iPhone pictures and posting them to SmugMug with SmugShot.

SmugShot is a nifty little iPhone app that uploads iPhone pictures and videos directly to your SmugMug galleries. SmugShot is a freebie so I cannot, in good faith, whine about missing features but SmugShot has one serious deficiency: it strips EXIF timestamps. Native iPhone jpegs contain EXIF timestamps but after passing through SmugShot only GPS information survives. I am not sure if this is by design or oversight but I don’t like it!

The fix is straight forward:

1. Download SmugMug metadata.
2. Download all SmugShot pictures.
3. Match pictures with metadata and use upload timestamps as date taken EXIF timestamps.
4. Finally replace the uploaded SmugShot images with the EXIF repaired versions.

Simple but tedious. The following J word manipulates Phil Harvey’s superb command line utility exiftool to cleanup the SmugShot metadata mess. The words used by smugshotexif are in the J script SmugShotFix.ijs. You can also find this script in the J files sidebar of this blog. Look in the J Scripts directory. Let’s hope the next version of SmugShot fixes the date time issue and hacks like this will no longer be necessary.

smugshotexif=:4 : 0

NB.*smugshotexif v--  inserts missing EXIF  metadata  in SmugShot
NB. iPhone uploads.
NB.
NB. The  iPhone  SmugShot  app  removes  EXIF  information during
NB. upload. This verb restores items I care about.
NB.
NB. dyad:  btclSmugMetaData smugshotexif clPathFile
NB.
NB.   NB. update TAB delimited SmugMug metadata tables
NB.   SmugTablesFrXml2 'c:\pd\docs\smugmug\data\smugheavy.xml'
NB.
NB.   NB. load SmugShot specific metadata
NB.   SMUGSHOTMD=: readsmugshots 0
NB.
NB.   SMUGSHOTMD smugshotexif 'c:\pictures\2011\Missouri\wip\1204618219_smugshot_9811805.jpg'
NB.
NB.   NB. fix all jpg files in a directory
NB.   (<SMUGSHOTMD) smugshotexif&> 1 dir 'c:\pictures\2011\Missouri\wip\*.jpg'

NB. extract SmugMug id from SmugShot file name
spid=. <extractsmugid y

NB. all smugshot pids
pids=. x {"1~ (0{x) i. <'PID'

if. spid e. pids do.

  NB. metadata exists for image insert items
  pos=. pids i. spid

  exif=. setartistcopyright y

  NB. use upload date for the missing original datetime
  date=. ;pos { x {"1~ (0{x) i. <'UPLOADDATE'
  date=. '-:' charsub date
  exif=. date setdate y

  caption=. ;pos { x {"1~ (0{x) i. <'CAPTION'
  exif=. caption setdescription y

  lb=. pos { x {"1~ (0{x) i. ;:'LATITUDE LONGITUDE'
  if. *./ 0 < #&> lb do.
    lb=. _999&". &> lb
    exif=. lb setlatlng y
  end.

  NB. rename as iphone file with original smugshot number
  NB. format path chars for windows rename
  newname=. '.jpg'&beforelaststr y
  newname=. 'iphone ',('_'&afterlaststr) @:(' [s'&beforelaststr) newname
  shell '/\' charsub 'rename ' , ; ' ' ,&.> dblquote y;newname,'.jpg'

  newname ; exif
else.
  'No SmugShot metadata for';spid
end.
)

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