Saving the camera settings of a shot in the exif data of the scans

Analog photography metadata

For decades (centuries?) photographers have been writing their camera settings for each shot on a notebook to learn and train their eye, to organise their shots or because they are data-freaks. Today, you could still make notes by hand or use a dedicated smartphone app or you could be the proud owner of a more modern film camera that saves the shot data on a memory card.

Once the film developed, by yourself or a lab, and scanned, by yourself or a lab, the scans you get do not have the information of the original shots. These data are on paper, on a smartphone or on a memory card.

I downloaded the Analog app for my smartphone, because it is free, does not collect user data, it’s lightweight and I loved the design, and I began saving the settings for each shot. Data was accumulating but I was not seeing how to get it out yet.

A digital camera would take the picture and save the settings inside the jpg or tiff files in exif data. I want the same thing for my scans!

And how to get these data in the exif fields of the scans? Well surprisingly, it’s not as straightforward as you (I) would expect. At first I did not find anything satisfying and discussing with the developers behind Analog made it clear that it was not a straightforward task for them either. We talked about workflow.

The team were encouraging amateur and professional photographers to rename their files, well their scans, following this convention to save the settings of each shot. Then they developed Analog which of course allows users to save Shutter speed, Aperture, the lens’ focal length and exposure correction. At the end of the roll, the data is extracted and the user receives a list of name files by email:

Test roll_NO01_SS50_A2.8_FL50_EX0
Test roll_NO02_SS50_A2.8_FL50_EX0
Test roll_NO03_SS125_A4_FL50_EX0
Test roll_NO04_SS125_A4_FL50_EX0

They hand-rename the scans or use a renaming software. OK. but this does not go inside the files, a file name is not an ideal way of storing data even when using the standardised convention they created: NOSSAFLEX

It’s as easy as the name – NOSSAFLEX has all of the information in the title.

NO = Number
SS = Shutter Speed
A = Aperture
FL = Focal Length
EX = Exposure

I could not find a way to automatically save the data on my phone to the exif slots of my scans…

So I decided to create an R package to do it! An exciting weekend project and certainly an article for the blog!

Since I was already using the Analog app, I had to follow its data structure.

Here is the README of my package

This package relies on a file naming convention for, essentially analog, photography. Photographs taken on film, then developed, then scanned are lacking important metadata or if they have, it’s from the scanning device, not the original camera. The nossaflex package takes NOSSAFLEX structured file names and can 1) batch rename corresponding pictures and 2) edit their exif data to add information such as focal length, shutter speed, aperture. This allow a photographer to take notes on the Analog app while shooting pictures, export nossaflex compatible file names and use R to rename scans and edit their exif metadata with corresponding shot information.

The nossaflex package is the entry of the NOSSAFLEX file naming convention into the R universe to help scientific, professional or amateur photographers to name their picture files consistently and informatively.

When taking a picture with an analog camera, data such as aperture, shutter speed or focal length are not automatically saved the way they are in a digital camera. Many photographers write down these precious metadata in a notebook, we want to help them improve their workflow and data quality.

What is NOSSAFLEX?

Here is an explanation from the creators:

It’s as easy as the name – NOSSAFLEX has all of the information in the title.

NO = Number
SS = Shutter Speed
A = Aperture
FL = Focal Length
EX = Exposure

NOSSAFLEX file names looks like this: NO03_SS250_A8_FL80_EX0.jpg or this: NO34_SS30_A2.8_FL35_EX+1.tiff!

Learn more on their website or on their Youtube channel.

The package

Here are the two main functions in the package:

• renaming_nossaflex batch-renames picture files from uninformative DSC_00345.jpg to information-rich NOSSAFLEX name based on data provided by the user, see {analog} section: NO03_SS250_A8_FL80_EX0.jpg.
• editing_exif batch-saves the metadata of the pictures into the exif slots of the scan files (jpg, tiff, etc).

Analog or an other app

The workflow

Installation

You can install the development version of nossaflex from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
# devtools::install_github("AlbanSagouis/nossaflex")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(nossaflex)
files <- c("Pictures/2024/01 02 Winter in Berlin/DSC_001034",
           "Pictures/2024/01 02 Winter in Berlin/DSC_001035",
           "Pictures/2024/01 02 Winter in Berlin/DSC_001036")
filenames <- reading_nossaflex(path = "path_to_the_filenames.txt") # provided by the `analog` app
renaming_nossaflex(filenames = filenames, files = files)

Additionally you may want to safely save the shots metadata inside the scans:

metadata <- reading_nossaflex(path = "path_to_the_filenames.txt") |>  # provided by the `analog` app
     parsing_nossaflex()
editing_exif(files, metadata)

Related work

The package relies heavily on the great exiftoolr package by @JoshOBrien which itself depends on the great exiftool software by Phil Harvey.

Finally, jExifToolGUI also offers exif editing and with a Graphical Interface, nice.