Something was bugging me

I was building out the basic UI components to display my photos here on my site and I realized that I wanted to display some of the image metadata I can see when I open the iamges in software like Darktable. I thought this kind of information would be something other photographers would find interesting. Also, since I'm really an amateur and just getting started in my photography journey, I wanted a way to keep track of the settings I used in different photos on my site. Additionally, I wanted a way to add photos to my media directory and automatically have those rendered on my site.

My first thought was that there must be some JavaScript library that could handle both problems. After looking around, I wasn't seeing anything that seemed to work the way I had envisioned. I did realize there was one tool I was already using that kind of did what I wanted.

Leveraging Nuxt Content

I am already using Nuxt Content to provide most of the text you see on this site. It offers a simple, file-based, Content Management System (CMS) and provides a very intuitive interface for querying documents. My Projects & Blog pages query their respective content directories to render their card components. I realized that I could use a similar approach for showing my photos if I had a corresponding Markdown file that included the path to the image file as well as the details I was looking for.

However, this got me back to wondering if I would be stuck manually creating markdown files every time I wanted to add a picture. I knew that added friction would eventually mean I stop adding new photos. There had to be some way to improve this. That sounded like a good job for code!

Writing an Exif Parser

Exif is a format for storing metadata for image and audio files. It is a universal standard used to encode this data and many applications are desgined to read it. So this gave me something to start researching.

Thankfully the most popular Python library for handling images, Pillow, has the ability to read Exif tags and parse them out. Once I found that, I was able to quickly stitch together a script to handle this for me. I wrote this specifically for the way my site handles content so many of the details are hard-coded. I do intend to make it more general purpose through some configuration values that I, or anyone else, could set. If you, dear reader, want to make use of this application you will likely need to modify the code somewhat. However, please feel free to take it for a spin.

You can find the code here. As I mentioned above, this is currently written in Python (my love language). However, it strikes me that this kind of processing might be something I could re-write in Rust!