Reading Camera Data with an Applescript Droplet and Exiftool

Posted by John Clark on December 13, 2016 in Uncategorized, Workflow |One Comment

If you write blogs about photography then at some stage you are going to caption your pictures with info about shutter speed, exposure etc. In order to gain access to this info you would need to go into Lightroom, Photoshop or any other imaging software to copy the data out, which frankly is a bit of a pain. What would be easier is to have the info you need copied to the clipboard for you to paste into your article.

In order to use this little applet you will need to install ExifTool by Peter Harvey. This is a Terminal program that drags pretty much every ounce of EXIF data out of your image. Don’t worry togs, you will not be using the Terminal for this!

Once you have followed the instructions and installed ExifTool (takes seconds BTW) you need to copy and paste some applescript code to access the results from Exiftool. Be careful how you copy the applescript code. It has to be perfect otherwise it will not compile. If you still have problems copy to TextEdit and hit cmd-shift-T to convert it to plain text. Then paste that into the Script Editor or download the script here.

—copy from here

on open thepath

set theData to checkExif(thepath)

set theText to paragraphs of theData

set theChoice to choose from list theText with multiple selections allowed

try

set theMessage to TextDelimters(theChoice, “,”, return) as string

tell application “Finder”

set the clipboard to the theMessage

end tell

tell me to activate

display dialog “Info copied to the clipboard”

end try

end open

on checkExif(thepath)

set thePOSIX to quoted form of POSIX path of thepath

set theResult to do shell script “/usr/local/bin/exiftool -S -common -copyright ” & thePOSIX

end checkExif

on TextDelimters(l_ist, delimiterTOremove, delimiterTOcreate)

set text item delimiters to delimiterTOremove

set l_ist to get every text item of l_ist

set text item delimiters to delimiterTOcreate

set newlist to l_ist as string

set text item delimiters to “”

return newlist

end TextDelimters

—to here

Open up Script Editor in Utilities/Script Editor. Create New and paste the script in.Hit cmd-k to compile and it should like this.

Save as Application to the desktop or whereever. You now have a droplet.Drag an image  to the droplet and let go and you will see a list of simple camera data.

With the cmd key pressed select the data you want and hit OK.

The info you have picked will be saved to the clipboard ready to be pasted into your blog.

You can adapt the amount of data you get from the image by consulting the Exiftool manual and replacing  “/usr/local/bin/exiftool -S -common -copyright ” with your own commands.

For workshop workflows go here