My photos tagged by camera, thanks to the Flickr API

By Kris | Published
Oct
23
2008

I have to admit, being both a photography hobbiest and a web developer can lead to some interesting ideas and fun challenges.

With the arrival of my new Rebel XSi yesterday (more details coming), I’ve officially become a 2 DSLR shooter and, in addition to my other cameras, I wanted a way to showcase and browse photos from each camera. With almost all of my photos hosted at Flickr, you think it’d be pretty darn easy, right? Well, yes and no.

Flickr does have the capability to read the EXIF data of your photos automatically, including camerea information, as shown below:

So that’s it, right? All you need to do is click on Canon EOS 20D and you can see all your photos with that camera. Actually, that takes you to everyone’s photos with that camera, not just yours. A little disappointing, and it made me start to think whether I was the only one who wanted this feature.

No worries, since I’ve used the Flickr API before to fix other issues, and knowing that the EXIF data for a photo was at my fingertips when using Flickr, I had myself a new little challenge to play with. The API method flickr.photos.getExif was sitting there waiting for me, and I was off to the races.

Knowing I could access the EXIF data per photo was part of the task, figuring out how to use it for browsing my photos was the other half. It didn’t take me very long to decide on using Tags as the solution to that portion, and I was all set. I cracked open Visual Studio 2008 Express (C#), brushed up on the Flickr.NET API Kit, and started hacking away.

So the overall design of my little hack is simple:

  • Map the EXIF make and model values into different tags (i.e. EOS20D, SD890, etc.)
  • List photos from my account and read their EXIF values
  • Add the appropriate camera tag to each photo based on the EXIF values

And for the most part, that really was it.

One Little Snag

Just like everything, though, there were a few snags. The one worth mentioning is that some photos on Flickr didn’t have any EXIF values. Why? Well, it turns out for some sets that I uploaded when using JetPhoto Studio (just one example) to merge in my GPS waypoints for geotagging, it seems to have wiped out the EXIF data during the upload process. To demonstrate, none of the photos from my Road to Hana ’08 set have EXIF data. Bummer.

So what to do now? It turns out I was saved by my own laziness. 🙂

I still have all the original photos that have all the EXIF data in them, so all was not lost. Unfortunately, Flickr doesn’t retain the original file name of a photo when it was uploaded, but since I have way too many photos to update individually, more than a few still have the original file name as the photo title (such as IMG_6298). While I’m not proud that many of my photos still start with IMG_, I was able to take advantage of it this time by matching the IMG_ file name on my PC to the title on Flickr and make the association that way.

Reading the EXIF data from a file on your local computer is a little bit trickier then just a simple method in the Flickr API, but it’s still doable. I didn’t use this exact code, opting to roll my own instead, but it helped me figure out where to start looking.

The Results

After only about 4-6 hours of coding and testing, the full update itself only took about 20 minutes to read and process some 2,600+ photos on Flickr. The results are individual links below to browse my photos by camera (via Tags).

Not bad for half a day’s work.

Still More To Do

That’s going to be it for now, other than featuring the links on my Cameras page. Another benefit of having this camera data saved as Tags (and also being a web developer), I can take advantage of some existing work I’ve done with the Google Chart API on my Maui site for my Island Tag Match.

Here, I used the Flickr API to search for a specific tag per Hawaiian island and chart the results. For my Cameras page, I plan on doing the same per camera model in my photos on Flickr.

In addition to just having a little chart, I can also use the Flickr RSS feeds to have separate feeds per camera model (again, via tags), and then mashup those feeds in a little preview panel on different parts of my site. Here’s an example of the latest photos I’ve taken and upload with my Canon EOS 20D. Gonna be fun once I start using my new Rebel XSi.

Another leftover from the code I wrote from this little hack is that I know have an XML file I was using between the reading photo data and updating tags portions of my hack that has each photo, it’s PhotoId, a title and the Geo tags if is currently has been placed on my map. One of the things I plan to do with that is add photos the maps section on my Maui site, where most of my photos that have been geotagged were taken anyway. A nice little bonus.

Other Fun with Camera Data

That’s all from me, but I thought I’d share a few links of what Flickr and others have done with the camera information from EXIF data. BigHugeLabs.com, home to fd’s Flickr Toys, has a cool ranking section that shows off the most used cameras on Flickr. Flickr themselves have a nice little camera finder that let’s you not only browse through different makes and models, but also see photos on Flickr taken with those cameras.

If you’ve seen a similar hack or know of a site out there doing something cool with this time of camera EXIF data, please do tell.

Thanks,
– Kris.

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