EXIF Sucks
What I want is simple. I want to be able to go through a directory of pictures
and annotate them. I want to store the annotation inside the pictures, and I
want to extract that information with python. This has proved to be damned near
impossible.<p>
While there are <a href="http://pyexif.sourceforge.net/">several</a>
<a href="http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/">tools</a> <a
href="http://home.cfl.rr.com/genecash/">available</a> to extract exif data from
python, none of them appear to be able to write exif data. Thus, I cannot store
visitor's comments in the python files, which is one way I was considering 
storing them.<p>
Oh well, I'm flexible, I thought, I can add comments using a client-side
tool and just extract them with these scripts. After wrestling unsuccessfuly 
with <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libexif">gexif</a> for an hour 
or so, I realized that I would need a comment editor on my Windows partition
too. Based on a quick search, there was nothing palatable for that.<p>
So, Exif was out; I can dump information from it, but not put it in. A quick
glance at the horribly written standards document told me that I wasn't going
to spend the time to write a python module to insert comments into jpeg files,
especially when the authors of much more serious programs hadn't even braved
those waters.<p>
I checked out <a href="http://fotonotes.net/spec/">FotoNotes</a>, but there
exist no python modules for working with it, so it's out. I checked out 
<a href="http://www.spack.org/wiki/IptcSpecification">IPTC</a>,
but it has exactly the same limitations as exif - lots of tools read its data,
but I found no decent ones for writing it.
<p>I've yet to check out
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/rdfpic/">RDFPic</a>, but at this point I feel
like using jpeg image meta-data is so brittle as to be worthless. I don't trust
that anybody else is ever going to be able to extract the meta-data from the
file in the future, so why should I go through extra effort to put it in there 
in the first place?<p>
And that's the story of why I think I'm going to store image meta-data outside 
of image files, contrary to every meta-data principle I have.<p>
<h2>Postscript</h2><p>
Now that I have that off my chest, I will say that the image gallery is moving
forward nicely. As soon as I can get my host to install PIL, I'll have a
working demo up here. At the moment, they're appearing lethargic at best. More
information when events warrant.
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