exif

It happens every time you press the shutter. Tiny circuits spring into action and furiously record the information from every sensor pixel onto your memory card. But pixel information is not all that is recorded. With every shutter press, your camera records dozens of interesting details about how the photo was taken. These details are tucked away deep inside the labyrinth of code that comprises your photo file. Photo editing softwares, such as Photoshop or Lightroom, can unlock some of this data for viewing later. But they normally only scratch the surface of the available information by displaying only the most commonly used Exif tags.

To mine the deepest depths of your Exif data, you may want to try a utility called Exiftool. This utility is known for its ability to squeeze every last drop of information from your Exif data. Don’t expect a slick, graphical interface, though. Although there are more user friendly softwares which incorporate the Exiftool engine, we’re going to demonstrate Exiftool where it is at its minimalist best – at the command line.

9 out of 10 adults in America believe that people are over-sharing sensitive personal information.

Many photographers, especially those who used to shoot film, still enjoy the feedback and control offered by fully manual lenses. The only problem with using these lenses in the digital age is that modern camera bodies don't recognize them and therefore add no EXIF lens data to your images; adding that data up until now required you to install a command line tool such as ExifTool and learn complicated prompts. But now there's an easier way to make these changes happen inside of Lightroom.

EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.

What you see here may be the first leaked photograph shot with the upcoming iPhone 5. The EXIF data claims it was shot with the iPhone 4, but other EXIF details indicate otherwise. Although the leaked image was cropped, the original size of the image was 3264x2448 (roughly 8MP), the rumored resolution found on the next iPhone. The lens info was recorded as "4.3mm f/2.4", more similar to a point-and-shoot than then 3.85mm f/2.8 lens found on the iPhone 4. Finally, the geotag info in the photo shows it was taken at 37.33216667,-122.03033333 -- the location of Apple's headquarters. Check out the full-res file with EXIF intact here.

Google has added EXIF data to …

For photo enthusiasts, Google’s new Google+ social network is something like Flickr mixed with Facebook. It has the social …

On August 4, 2006, AOL published a text file containing 20 million searches done by 650,000 users over a 3-month period for research purposes. Although the company anonymized the data by showing the users as numerical IDs, people soon realized that many people searched for personally identifiable information (e.g. their names), allowing real names to be put to unique IDs, thus revealing the search history of that individual. After the media caught wind of this, the whole thing was known as the AOL search data scandal.

One of the big advantages of digital photography is that EXIF data is embedded into your images, allowing you to easily learn when and how (and more recently where) a particular photograph was captured. If you still enjoy shooting film, then a solution is to jot down notes about your photography while you're shooting.

Here’s an interesting snippet from an article published today by David Pogue of …

AmoK Exif Sorter is a program written for photographers obsessed with organization, allowing …

Yesterday, Canon announced a rather strange and unexciting Canon 7D "upgrade." It's not exactly an upgrade either -- all of the camera specs for the new Canon 7D Studio Version are unchanged. For $1829 for the body only ($130 more than the current 7D), photographers can have several "locked levels" of the camera. Pay even more and you get a barcode scanning kit and a wireless transfer unit, the WFT-E5A.

So essentially, an extra $900 on top of the regular 7D price lets you have the camera equivalent of parental controls, plus barcode scanning that embeds information into the EXIF data in photos.

Sure, there's a (somewhat niche) practical application for these features. The locked levels can allow for quick settings that can't be changed without a password -- perfect for head photographers to who send mindless drones out to shoot or have little faith in their assistants.

The most recent fuel for resentment towards BP comes from a doctored photo of the company's crisis center in Houston. America blog's John Aravosis made the connection when he examined a hi-resolution version of the photo, which was displayed prominently on the BP website. All this comes after BP promised for increased transparency between the company and the public.

Here’s a useful tool you might want to bookmark: …

If you’re not naturally an organized person, then figuring out where certain photos are on your computer or external …