Recently, I've gotten into taking pictures, and having posted them online, I found myself wanting to know more about how they were taken.
Namely, the exif information. The camera, lens, aperture, shutter speed, etc.
Flickr shows this information on image-pages, but there are pictures hosted all around the web.
Mine, for example, are hosted in an S3 bucket. I wanted a JavaScript plugin/script that I could drop into a site, and it would provide me an API or method to access the exif data about any images on the page that contained some.
That brought me to a few places. One of the first being how to read data through JavaScript, as can be seen in the article: Reading local files in JavaScript.
It turns out that a developer named Jacob Seidelin has spent some time looking into this. He's created a jQuery plugin that extracts this information, and makes it available.
More about the script can be found here:
http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/05/jquery-exif-data-plugin.html
A demonstration of the script can be found here:
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/exifjquery/
I think I stumbled on these resources through the blog posts Extract EXIF Information with JavaScript and Photo Caption - Direct from EXIF Image Data by Michael Suodenjoki. Coincidentally, both Jacob and Michael seem to call Copenhagen home.
Anyway..
The Idea
Mr. Seidelin has already done an amazing job. The raw resources he uses can be accessed here:
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/exif/exif.js
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/binaryajax/binaryajax.js
Want I want to do is port his jQuery plugin to MooTools.
I want this to contain two resources:
- One that acts as an API, using a MooTools class as a proxy
- One that acts as a drop-in solution, with a UI piece that overlays the page with the exif data
The inspiration behind the second resource comes from the Chrome Web Store plugin EXIF Viewer.
I want it to be hosted on GitHub, including the MooTools library, Mr. Seidelin's libraries, the icons needed and the MooTools class itself.
Boom.