(Archived) Suggestion: Index image metadata (EXIF and IPTC)

[SwissPol 1]

It seems that if you add JPEG images to notes whose EXIF metadata contains an orientation tag, it is ignored. This is an annoying bug, as pretty all digital cameras sold today will use this tag when taking a picture in landscape or portrait mode. There are other ways to obtain such images: rotating an image with Preview and saving it will most often take advantage of the tag instead of touching the image data, or scanning in Image Capture and applying a rotation beforehand.

More info here:

http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/e ... ation.html

Images with EXIF orientation tags look correct in the majority of Mac applications and the fact that Evernote doesn't support them is quite annoying.

You can find some sample code around that shows how to support this - you mostly need to retrieve the value for the orientation tag using ImageIO, then apply the corresponding matrix when drawing the image:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... ing38.html

Please fix in the next release

[jbardi 1]

funny how users think they have to tell the developers how to implement a feature... as if they are brain dead... hilarious... really, it truly is!

[SwissPol 1]

I'm glad you're having fun and providing such constructive criticism...

In any case, according to this previous post (viewtopic.php?f=38&t=10911&p=44104), Evernote folks are not necessarily aware of how this JPEG orientation thing works nor how to support it on the Mac.

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the report. We're using Apple's WebKit to render the note contents on the Mac, and this appears to ignore the EXIF rotation extension. You'll see the same behavior from Safari, e.g.:

http://www.kotikone.fi/kuukkeli/antin_exiftran.html

Some of the figures in this picture are on their side in Safari because Apple does not look at the EXIF rotation flags. You'll see similar behavior in virtually any web browser.

We're looking at longer-term solutions to support things like this EXIF extension even if Apple does not, but this isn't a trivial fix because we don't want to change the files you put in Evernote ... the actual bytes may be important to you later, and we want to preserve them.

Thanks

[SwissPol 1]

I agree you absolutely shouldn't touch the user data, but I think I have a simple solution that might work for you: the use of CSS transforms:

Since the Evernote XML is not really HTML (i.e. you don't embed an image with

More info on CSS transforms here:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/libra ... forms.html

[engberg 89]

Thanks for passing that along.

[SwissPol 1]

No problem, I really like Evernote, and I hope this fix works, as having rotated images in your notes is a serious annoyance

[adambox 0]

just want to chime in and say that this is quite an annoying limitation. If I get my images off my iPhone with Image Capture, the EXIF is ignored and I have to manually rotate. If I send them from the Evernote iPhone app, it works, but I usually want to keep the image in my photo roll, which Evernote doesn't do if I snap it from in the app.

If you implement the fix suggested above, make sure it works in the web and Windows versions of Evernote as well, as I use all four regularly (because it's so useful!)

[evermullah 8]

the use of CSS transforms

good and simple idea!

guess why i stumbled upon this topic? i need the same feature.

so i ++support this "request" and hope it'll be here the next ...

cheers,

[sterlingz 7]

There is an issue with the Evernote iPhone client that previously was not solvable due to restrictions by the Apple SDK in how apps could interact with EXIF metadata from camera roll photos, but those restrictions are no longer an issue with the current shipping version of the OS.

The issue is this - I almost always use the Apple built-in camera app for taking photos. My main reason is speed - the app is much more responsive and quick to use. I find Evernote's photo note option too slow to use, but this is nothing really against the app, it's just faster to shoot a bunch of photos quickly with the camera app, in fact this is the case with any other app that uses the camera function. I then have the option to edit the photo in Photoshop Mobile or Photogene if I want to crop or adjust it. So it makes sense not to use the built in Snapshot Note function, and instead use the Camera Roll note for a lot of reasons. I often snap photos, and then go through them later and choose which ones I want to use for various things, including adding to my Evernote library.

However, one of the major problems with this is that Evernote assigns the GPS coordinates from where you create the note at, rather than where the photo was taken. This, for me at least, almost defeats the purpose of photo notes in the first place, as location is one of the most important pieces of metadata for a photo note. I often take snaps of restaurants, shops, etc. so I can have a record of those places. The location information is quite important to those notes, so not having the original coordinates honored by Evernote is a big issue. Without it, I might as well use any other photo management tool as they will use the embedded EXIF data.

I know that originally, the SDK did not give developers access to the full EXIF data, but this has changed with recent version of the SDK. Most Flickr apps allow you to use the photo's GPS data rather than your current location to assign coordinates visible in Flickr. Even photo editing applications have been updated to preserve the GPS coordinates (previously, they would also strip out this metadata) It would be really beneficial to Evernote iPhone to behave in the same way. Additionally, it would be great to have the option to use the date the photo was taken as the creation date for the note. When the photo was taken is much more important than when the note was created. Now that we can change the creation date, it's possible to go in and modify that, but it would be much easier if this was automated.

I think leveraging the data from the photos themselves (location and date) for saved photo notes would make this feature much more valuable to Evernote iPhone users. I hope the iPhone client can be tweaked to accommodate this in future.

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the report. I wasn't aware there was a change in the SDK, so I'll pass that along to the developers.

Thanks

[sterlingz 7]

Thank you Dave.

An example you can point them to is Mobile Fotos (universal app for iPhone and iPad). When uploading a photo, there is a toggle switch in the settings with the option to "Use Original Location." It's an on off switch, so you can use the current location (the app asks to use your location on launch), or the photo's location.

Actually - this app is worth looking at for the UI overall. The upload interface allows you to choose the set, tags, privacy and more for the photo before you upload it to Flickr. I would love to see similar functionality in the Evernote app - after choosing a photo, allow us to select the notebook it is going to, what tags we'd like to add, what date to use (today's or photo's), and whether to use the GPS from the metadata or current location. This would be really welcome functionality for the Camera Roll Note within the Evernote iPhone app, and would lead me to use it a lot more. To have to go back and edit notes after they're created is a little counter-intuitive. I can see that this function was designed with speed in mind, just select the photo and the note is instantly created. But I think when creating these notes, it would help to be able to add the necessary context at the time of upload.

FlickrStackr is another app that offers similar functionality with a completely different take on the UI. They even show a little map that indicates where the photo was taken as one of the tabs in their upload interface.

Thanks for letting the engineers know about this - I think it would be a great improvement.

[sterlingz 7]

Just remembered my own workaround for this - just e-mail the notes into Evernote from the Photos app, and the GPS data will be honored. You can also select the notebook they are going to and tags by using the e-mail title trick.

Still, I think it would be worth patching the app. You do want people to use it, right? I got to a point where I would just e-mail everything into Evernote and never really use the iPhone app.

[stoerring 0]

Dave, would you be so kind and tell me when this feature has been implemented on the Evernote Blogcast (podcast). Thank you. Sven

[olintsmith 1]

This still seems to be true. No joy!

As a command-line workaround -- I had a bunch of images taken in the same portrait orientation that I wanted to load; for me the right thing was (with the exif and ImageMagick packages installed from brew or MacPorts):

exif --remove * (remove EXIF data so that Preview and Evernote will agree on the image orientation)

mogrify -rotate 90 *modified.jpeg (to physically rotate the images; note that this is a lossy operation! Replace 90 with the number of degrees 0..360 to rotate the image.)

You could use exif --tag Orientation --ifd 0 --set-value 1 instead if you didn't want to completely remove the EXIF data.

[gbarry 2,658]

Our documentation guru actually put together an AppleScript you all might find useful.

https://github.com/inkedmn/evernote-dated-photo

From his intro:

For a long time, I've wanted to add photos taken with my digital camera to Evernote and have the Created date of the note match the date the photo was taken. This application, when a file or folder is dropped onto it, will read the EXIF data of the image, create a new note in Evernote containing the image and if present, set the created date on the note to the date read from the image's EXIF data.

This simple application consists of an AppleScript droplet and a Python script (which depends on EXIF.py, a third-party Python library used to retrieve EXIF data from digital camera image files.

[evermullah 8]

Our documentation guru actually put together an AppleScript you all might find useful.

that might be useful in the case he described, but will it help up showing images which already exist in notes with the correct EXIF orientation?

i see my first post here was 2010 and the initial post is from 2009. thats quite a long time.

CSS Transformation as posted before could do the job, or not?

as a user i'd like to have something like

[x] use EXIF Data to show images with their correct orientation

in the settings of EN.

i can't imagine that this could take 2 years of development, but i don't work at EN...

[gbarry 2,658]

i see my first post here was 2010 and the initial post is from 2009. thats quite a long time...i can't imagine that this could take 2 years of development, but i don't work at EN...

That's a fair point, though it's highly likely attention and dev time, if it was looking at this issue, was diverted towards other bugs and features, and this just was pushed down the queue.

I'll add this back to my own request pipeline for internal discussion.

[evermullah 8]

I'll add this back to my own request pipeline for internal discussion.

Thank you gbarry. 2 or 3 years. thats makes no difference ;-)

while i read about the tool you adverdised and totally failed to get it working (i'm on a mac, because i don't want to play around/experimenting, i want to use things), i don't ask for support here,

*but*,

i'd like to know, if you know a tool which will add me about 30 small PDFs and write their filedate (date of creation) automaticly as the note's creation date?

that would be a big timesaver, because those PDFs have dates betweeen 1990 and 2000. and changing a notes date within EN is a big pain. i repeat: a really big pain.

[gbarry 2,658]

i'd like to know, if you know a tool which will add me about 30 small PDFs and write their filedate (date of creation) automaticly as the note's creation date?

that would be a big timesaver, because those PDFs have dates betweeen 1990 and 2000. and changing a notes date within EN is a big pain. i repeat: a really big pain.

Nothing I've ever seen has been able to match EN's datestamp with the file creation date. Manual will likely be the way to go with this one.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

i'd like to know, if you know a tool which will add me about 30 small PDFs and write their filedate (date of creation) automaticly as the note's creation date?

that would be a big timesaver, because those PDFs have dates betweeen 1990 and 2000. and changing a notes date within EN is a big pain. i repeat: a really big pain.

I seem to remember an AppleScript referenced in the old forums that imported files to Evernote and set the Note date to the file date.

Don't know if it was file Created Date or Last Mod date, but you could probably change it to your liking.

You might try a search on "applescript import" or something like that to see what it turns up.

Please let us know if you get something that works -- I'm sure a lot of folks could use this.

HTH.

[gbarry 2,658]

i'd like to know, if you know a tool which will add me about 30 small PDFs and write their filedate (date of creation) automaticly as the note's creation date?

that would be a big timesaver, because those PDFs have dates betweeen 1990 and 2000. and changing a notes date within EN is a big pain. i repeat: a really big pain.

I seem to remember an AppleScript referenced in the old forums that imported files to Evernote and set the Note date to the file date.

Don't know if it was file Created Date or Last Mod date, but you could probably change it to your liking.

You might try a search on "applescript import" or something like that to see what it turns up.

Please let us know if you get something that works -- I'm sure a lot of folks could use this.

HTH.

It took a bit of digging, but I found it. Post is pretty dusty, but Veritrope links to Applescript that presumably does (I haven't tested) what you're looking for.

http://discussion.ev...dpost__p__65056

Nice memory JM.

[mathew 0]

As far as I can tell, Evernote ignores the Headline, Subject and Description fields in the EXIF and IPTC data of images.

This unfortunately makes it not terribly useful for indexing images.

It seems to me that it wouldn't be hard to make the back end index IPTC and EXIF. How about it?