Supported Camera Formats

Contents

1. Extracting Metadata
2. Uploading Images from the Camera

Extracting Metadata

Metadata is information the camera saves about the photo and Photo Album Manager attempts to extract and save, in particular:

• Timestamp
• Geometry (width x height)

I anticipate adding support for GPS location when it becomes more common.

Some cameras have an option to save metadata in a text file, for example the Nikon Coolpix models I've seen can create an info.txt file alongside the photos in the image folder.

Most modern cameras also save metadata within each JPEG or TIFF image using EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format). While some field labels and formats vary among manufacturers and perhaps among models, the timestamp field appears to be standard, for example:

Date Time Original: 2007:11:11 21:24:35.

so that should be extractable from any camera. Whether the same will hold true of the GPS location remains to be seen.

Uploading Images from the Camera

If your camera stores images to the flash memory in one or more subfolders under a "dcim" folder, as many Nikons and Canons do, then the easiest way to upload images from your camera is

1. Make the flash memory visible to the Photo Album Manager server, either by connecting the camera to a USB port or by taking the flash memory out of the camera and inserting it into a USB card reader or PCMCIA adapter.
2. Run the scripts/local/fotoupload.sh script which will create a uniquely-named (using the date and time) folder and copy all the images to it, after which it will offer to erase the flash memory.

If you're using a camera-phone that stores images in a single "Images" or "my_pix" folder, then substitute the scripts/local/phoneupload.sh script in the second step.

If your flash-memory is laid-out some other way, you'll need to copy the images manually. In that case, please let me know about the layout so I can update the scripts to support your camera.