New app for making "exif notes"

Eugen Mezei said:

As the app discussed in this thread is Google only, I hope nobody means if I ask you the name of the app for iOS.

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sorry, I missed your post. I use "PhotoEXIF", but the developer hasn't updated it in a long time. It has a few issues, and it doesn't work well with large format, which is most of what I shoot now. It has an mac app to aply the stored data to your scans, but if you dont like the app or are on windows, you can also get the data out in CSV format.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photoexif/id618666220

Hi everyone!

It's been a long time since I've made an update, and about six months have passed since the last version release. However, the project is still alive and kicking, and I have some pretty exciting news to share this time. I've just released version 1.18.0 to the beta channel for early adopters to test. This is again a major overhaul of the codebase with two clear goals:

• Update the UI appearance/theme to Material 3
• Make the project repository public

We'll get to the second point soon, but first about the UI update. This version has the most dramatic change to the appearance of the app since its first release, and I think it looks pretty good. It uses the new Material 3 style components for all supported devices, and Android 12+ users get to enjoy Dynamic Color, a feature that automatically adjusts the app theme based on your current wallpaper. The app also now supports landscape orientation. There might be some animation/transition bugs when switching between orientations and app fragments (views). This is to be expected, and hopefully we'll get around to fixing some of those appearance related bugs later on. One minor feature which I was forced to remove was the user's ability to change the UI color palette. This would've been unsustainable in the long run, and required too much hassle to configure. Hopefully the new look and feel is enough to justify this omission.

The less visible but yet bigger change is the fact, that the source code is now in a shape where I am comfortable releasing it to the public. I've done a large amount of refactoring and introduced a lot of good practices and design patterns to make the project simpler and the code more manageable and approachable. The project repository is now publicly available on GitHub and the project is licensed under the GPLv3 license. This allows others to contribute to the project, so if there are any Android development capable Exif Notes users interested in contributing, do let me know. Also I ask that future bug reports and feature requests be made by creating an issue on GitHub. This way they can be tracked and referenced in commit messages. There is also a discussions section to share ideas, experiences or to ask questions.

The app also now has a dedicated website: https://www.exifnotes.com/
Although I have no idea what else to put there other than the stuff that's already there... I'm not even sure whether there is a need for a dedicated domain (it costs money), because I could just use GitHub pages to host the app website free of charge now that it's public. So the website with its current URL might not be around for that long. But if you have any ideas on what could be useful to have in the website, feel free to share them in the GitHub discussions section, for example. The privacy policy is at least something that needs to be available.

I guess that pretty much covers it. Hopefully I can get some feedback from the beta testers about the new version, so that I can publish it to the production channel soon. This way all users get to enjoy the new look of the app. And thank you already in advance!

Awesome! The updated UI looks really good. I've got several issues to report, so I'll open up reports on GitHub. Thanks for all your hard work. This app is indispensable for me.

Thanks for the app and keeping it up @team_player - I use it all the time and wouldn't mind to pay for this.

However - Can I be nasty and ask a blunt question here? Because it would be unwise to register on a whole platform just to have an interaction with one project in it... So - on the trend of filling the screen with less info by making the text/UI ridiculously large. With each beautiful iteration of this VERY USABLE TOOL there's less characters fitting on the screen (descriptions of frames, roll info) and with this redesign in particular I feel like I've accidentally enabled an Accessibility feature or two for poor eyesight. Is this intentional or simply a bug? I'm using Cat S62 Pro with a 1080 x 2160 pixel LCD, 18:9 ratio (~424 ppi density)

Version 1.17.0 fits 6 rolls and 10 frames on screen and I can write a whole lot more characters in input fields before they are cut due to the screen running out of realestate. I like writing more, but
Version 1.18.1 fits only 5 rolls and 6 frames on screen + cuts off a ton of characters due to the "zoomed-in" interface, making poor use of the screen real-estate in my humble opinion. Could that be avoided and/or am I the only one taking issue with this? Spotify does this too and I held on to the old version of it for the longest time - I feel that such changes are counterproductive and would love to hear the reasoning behind what I would call a loss of data visibility - if it's simply not a bug

Would love for the plain dark theme to continue to exist. I've set BW wallpaper for my phone, but the app displays colored grays and yellow accent appears out of nowhere and uninvited.

I'll attach some screens to illustrate my issue, comparing 1.17.0 to 1.18.1

Thanks Ivo for the valuable feedback! You're raising points and issues I hadn't really thought of that much lately. It's becoming harder to evaluate the functionality of new features as I am using the app quite rarely myself these days. Unfortunately I haven't been doing much film photography during the last few years so I'm using the app in a very simple manner with a limited dataset. That's where you guys come in and that's why I haven't yet pushed the big update to the production channel.

I've been moving towards using built-in default text styles in the Material UI framework instead of manually defining font sizes. I can see that the ready-made text styles I've selected for some of the UI components are a bit too large. Also the paddings and margins probably needed some adjustment among other things.

I've just released v1.18.2 to the beta channel, so you should be able to test it out pretty soon. It should address some of the concerns you had for the app looking like it has accessibility turned on. There was also one related issue on GitHub which is also taken into account in the new release.

Awesome, will back my database up and test it out

Hello Tommi,

Thank you for providing this app and the frequent updates for it! I started using Exif Notes about 3.5 years ago and it has become a daily companion for me as my analogue photography increased. Lately, not only have I used the app more, but also in conjunction with different cameras and formats. There are a few things that would make Exif Notes even better for me – and perhaps for others too – that I want to share with you here. (You actually addressed a few of the things I wrote down in the most recent update. The custom aperture values in particular are a fantastic addition!)

- ISO: Currently the lowest setting is 12. It would be nice to be able to go further down (6, 3...), and better yet, be able to set incremental values.
- ISO: Unless I'm missing something, the ISO value of a film is only exposed in the edit view (from the film overview, one needs to long-press the film in question to reveal the edit icon, click on that, etc). Every time I pick up a camera, this forces me to go through those steps in order to confirm the ISO I'm shooting at with that camera, to then be able to set my light metre to that value (this is of particular interest when working with cameras without built-in light metres).
- Filters: currently, the behaviour is such that filter settings are sticky, meaning that if one adds a frame with a filter in place, that setting will be carried over to the following frames as well. I can see how this is useful when walking around with e.g. a yellow filter that stays on the lens (and I do that myself from time to time). However, it can be misleading and I find myself checking and double-checking the filter field each time to make sure I am not recording filters that weren't on the lens. Especially when adding a new frame that was taken with a different lens, the sticky behaviour makes little sense to me. The easiest way to change this behaviour would probably be to let the user decide whether they want their filter settings to stick, but there are probably other ways I cannot think of.
- Exposure compensation: This field has a +3/-3 range, which means that I often cannot use it in my preferred fashion. For instance, when photographing a backlit scene, that often requires a +2 compensation. When using a filter at the same time, that can easily add another +2 stops or more. Therefore, can this range be extended?
- Sheet film (think large format): Many of the specifics of the app that make sense for roll films don't make so much sense when working with sheet film. I realise that this may be out of scope for the application, but wanted to share this anyway. There are other types, but typically, sheet film is held in sheet film holders that take 2 sheets, one on each side. The 2 sides may or may not contain the same type of film, their ISO settings may or may not be the same, their loaded/unloaded/developed dates may differ. In theory, sheets 1 and 2 might even have gone through different cameras (which is also the case for roll film magazines). My current workaround is to create a new "film" for each sheet, but it isn't pretty.

That's all I can think of at the moment. Thanks again for the lovely app!
Alex

team_player said:

Thanks so much for the positive comments!

I actually just found a bug in the app and released an update. It should be available in a couple of hours. Exporting ExifTool commands was broken, instead it shared the roll in .csv format when clicking either "Export exiftool cmds" or "Export .csv". To remedy this I had to disable .csv export entirely. I will try to find a more sophisticated fix. I figured the automatically generated ExifTool commands are more useful to more people than a .csv file.



Sure thing. Here's a short example/guide. I am using OS X, but Windows isn't all that different.

1. First you should define the artist name and copyright information in the app's settings. These can be anything, name, company, year etc.
2. You should define the "Exiftool path" in the settings if you haven't placed it in your PATH file. For example, I defined it as "~Tommi/Documents/Image-ExifTool-10.13/" (without the quote marks). That is to say the ExifTool executable is in a folder called Image-ExifTool-10.13 in my Documents folder.
3. Then you should define the "Path to pictures" setting. For me this is "~Tommi/Desktop/". That is to say the scanned files are on my desktop.
4. Name the scanned files to 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg etc. The number in the file name should correspond to the frame count in the app.
5. Export the roll's data by clicking "Export exiftool cmds". You can save the file in your Dropbox as a text file or send the text as an email for example.
6. Open the text file on your computer. Copy the commands for the files you wish to tag and paste them on your terminal. Make sure you run all the commands, you may have to press enter to run the last command.
7. ExifTool will run and update the exif tags of your scanned files.

That's it! I know it's a bit technical to tag the files using ExifTool, but then again it's an extremely powerful tool when mastered. Also I didn't want to develop separate apps for Windows and OS X when such tools as ExifTool are around.



It will only be available for Android sadly. I'm not at all familiar with iOS app development. Besides, I haven't really got the time to maintain the app on two different platforms. Keeping the Android version up-to-date is already time consuming enough.

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Hi everyone,
I spend the last three days searching for an alternative to PhotoExif, since the desktop app on my Mac (it says that needs an update that doesn't exist) is not connecting anymore to the iPhone. I used that app since 2014 and it was for me essential, maybe basic but fast, intuitive and very well designed.

The key of my workflow is to merge the metadata to my film scans. It was so easy before.. just connect the iPhone and sinchronize

Now, I installed ExifNotes Android and I find this app very powerful. There's no other alternatives with this capabilities.
I've read all the conversation here,I tried to search online tutorials, but I am too stupid to understand hot to work with Exiftool on my laptop. I have installed the .dmg and run the terminal but I am desperately looking for a video tutorial or a basic guide of the process: from exporting the "film roll" on ExifNotes ( I do not understand the points 2 and 3 - the paths) to sinchronize the scanned frames on Mac

The app is great, thank you so much for doing this! I just wish that the merging process would be easier!

Am wondering why this tool is so underrated, it's fundamental for every Film photographer!

Thank you for your help in advance.
Corrado

Wow I'm really happy to have found this thread and to see that you're so active here @team_player !

I've been using your app since Summer 2021 and it's an integral part of my analog workflow, thanks so much for your hard work developing it!

It may have been asked already, but to be sure, there are no plans to push out iOS version?

First of all, a big thanks, @team_player for a great tool! It's becoming core to my film photography workflow.

That said, I have quite a few things I'd like to capture that ExifNotes doesn't directly support. Although I have a programming background, I have yet to get into Android development so I did what I usually do, through something together in Python to fit my needs, parsing the JSON produced by ExifNotes to create custom exittool commands. The key was to add additional metadata tags in the Note field on each roll. This approach also meant I didn't have to rename my files to match the naming standard used by ExifNotes-generated exiftool commands.

As I hope to someday work directly on a copy of ExifNotes and eliminate the need for this workaround, I cloned your repository on github and I added my tool in my version of the repository.

For anyone else with similar needs, you can see it here:

JSON Parser

Regards,
Nate

I actually built a similar app myself for iPhone, so I really admire that you’ve managed to keep yours going and well-maintained over the years, that’s no small feat. I also really appreciate your approach of embracing the native feel by leaning into Material Design’s built-in components instead of reinventing the wheel. It works beautifully. Keep up the great work!