Thanks for the detailed response. I tried the PixVue application as suggested but unfortunatly (for me anyhow) it didn't add columns for EXIF info, only for some PixVue specific columns. Perhaps this only works in XP where shell32.dll seems to already provide this service. I'm curious, can XP users already see the EXIF columns in explorer, or xplorer2? If you, or anyone else, knows of another shell extension that exposes all the main EXIF tags as columns I'd love to hear about it. A quick search turned up nothing but I'll do some further searching.narayan wrote:We like to be ahead of ideas: EXIF columns are already there (well, for Windows 2000 and XP; NT4 does not support additional columns).
This is treated in FAQ http://netez.com/xplorer2/x2faq.htm, see C7 half-way down..
In fact, you can add MP3 and EXIF columns in x2; and x2 PRO can even search on these columns, sort on them, etc...
Let us see what you can do with it:
* Find all photos where flash did not fire and correct them for exposure
* Find all wide-angle photos and correct them for distortion
* If you have multiple cameras, find photos taken on a particular camera
* search for a photo taken on a particular date (this is not same as the Created Date)
* Search for all photos taken in portrait mode and resize them (Some cameras have a built-in provision, though)
For all corrections, you could use GIMP (freeware) or Photoshop CS.
The GIMP site (http://www.GIMP.org) also offers tutorials on photo-corrections (and a lot of other applications of GIMP).
You need to search only once, and then save the search results in temporary lists as *.CIDA files (save them from the scrap container). Then take up these photos one by one whenever you find time.
The CIDA file will serve as a TODO list for you: When you are done correcting a photo, you can remove it from the CIDA file (the photo will remain on the disk, don't worry!). The remaining photos in the CIDA file are yet to be processed.
@Using extracted EXIF information in renaming:
For that, we need extra "tokens" derived from EXIF data. The same could be done for MP3.
As far as we know, you are the first (amatuer?) digital photographer to visit these forums. We'd love to exchange ideas about how to serve your specific needs. Do share your ideas!
The two immediate applications that come to my mind are:
1) searching for all images in portrait mode and automatically rotating them (some new cameras do this automagically, but not mine).
2) automatically renaming images to something like "<YY><MM><DD><HH><MM><SS><Orientation><Flash>.jpg"
YY, MM, DD, HH, MM, SS - year/month/day/hour/minute/second the photo was taken (based on EXIF info, not file creation or modify time)
GIMP is good, GIMP2 is great. If you haven't tried it, you should. It can't even be compared to the original version. Love to support that free software (and a select few commercial apps well worthy of their cost of course!)
Nikos idea to have a $-<anything> token to identify any column seems like the most elegant solution here, assuming I can find a windows extension to provide EXIF information. The great thing about this idea is it would allow me to work with many other shell extensions that aren't so common (for example NI's LabVIEW LLB extension).
P.S. Amatuer would be a complement to what I do!
