on 10/11/04 8:19 am, Shangara Singh wrote:
> The right thing to do is to let the owners of the file decide. Either give
> them a menu item in the camera that lets them include/exclude camera EXIF
> data or applications such as Photoshop should give you the option when
> processing files or editing EXIF data.
Agreed.
However, most manufacturers and coders seem intent on squeezing more
information into EXIF rather than deleting it.
>> If you use OS X and don't have a problem with the command line, you could
>> use tiffutil to copy the images:
>>
>> $ tiffutil -none /path/to/image -out /path/to/image2
>
> Please can you expand a little...
Certainly. I'll expand a lot - so if you don't own a Mac running OS X, you
might want to move on to the next message...
Panther has a command line app called "tiffutil" which can do some useful
things with tiff data. This app is based on "tiffcp" which is available for
other *nix flavours and earlier versions of OS X.
The line that I posted earlier does very little :-) It reads the tiff data
in and then writes it back to disk with a slightly different name.
However, because tiffutil was conceived before people had much interest in
metadata, the saved file contains very little apart from the profile and
maker data.
I used to see this a *problem*, but now it's looking like a useful *feature*
:-)
It's also much faster than using Photoshop (or any other image editor) as it
doesn't need to waste time showing you pretty pictures on screen. Which also
means that you can keep working on other images in Photoshop while removing
the metadata and LZW compressing 10,000 tiffs.
Obviously, most Mac users would want to have this facility without having to
risk being seen purchasing a copy of Shell Scripting for Dummies - so we can
easily wrap the line in AppleScript and use it as a Folder Action*:
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
delay 10
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in these_items
set foo to item i of these_items
set bar to quoted form of (POSIX path of foo)
do shell script "tiffutil -lzw " & bar & " -out " & bar
end repeat
end adding folder items to
If anybody is unfamiliar with "Folder Actions":
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/folderactions/01.html>
Option-drag (to duplicate) your images into a folder that has the script
attached and it'll crunch through them pretty quickly.
On my laptop, this script will remove the metadata and compress 18Mb TIFFs
from a Nikon D100 at a rate of about 1 every 5 seconds - which is quite a
bit faster than Photoshop can manage :-)
*This script is only a quick example and the "delay" is an ugly kludge...
--
Martin Orpen
Idea Digital Imaging Ltd -- The Image Specialists
http://www.idea-digital.com
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