Burn exif meta data to photos

Deac Karns

Aug 5, 2022 • 2 min read

People always ask me "what were your camera settings for that photo", so I wrote some bash functions to burn the relevant data to the bottom of the image.

The following bash functions assume a few things:

you are on a Mac or Linux system
You know how to modify your .bash_profile (macOs) or .bashrc (Linux). We arent going to get into that here. For more info see https://linuxhint.com/simple-guide-to-create-open-edit-bash-profile/
You have exiftool installed
brew install exiftool (macOs)
apt install exiftool (Linux)

Once you have met the requirements, you just need to put the following functions in your appropriate profile.

function exifshort(){

  if hash exiftool 2>/dev/null; then
    echo ""
  else
    if [ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]; then
      brew install exiftool
    elif [ "$(expr substr $(uname -s) 1 5)" == "Linux" ]; then
      sudo apt install exiftool
    fi
  fi

  FILE=$1
  if [ -z "$FILE" ];then
    echo "${red}You must specify a file path${default}"
    exit 1
  else
    MODEL=`exiftool -Model $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    ISO=`exiftool -ISO $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    LENS=`exiftool -LensModel $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    EXPOSURE=`exiftool -ExposureTime $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    DATE=`exiftool -CreateDate $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    APERTURE=`exiftool -ApertureValue $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`
    FOCAL_LENGTH=`exiftool -FocalLength $FILE | awk -F ': ' '{print $2}'`

    echo "$MODEL + $LENS @ $FOCAL_LENGTH, ISO $ISO, $EXPOSURE seconds, f/$APERTURE, $DATE"
  fi
}

function burnexif(){
  IN=$1
  PAD=100
  FONT_SIZE=32

  PATH_IN=$(readlink -f $IN)
  EXTENSION=${PATH_IN##*.}
  PATH_OUT=${PATH_IN%.*}-processed.${EXTENSION}

  echo -e "\nProcessing:\n  $PATH_IN"
  echo -e "Output File:\n  $PATH_OUT"

  ((LEFT=(0 + $PAD)))
  ((RIGHT=$(identify -format '%w' $PATH_IN) - $PAD - 240))
  ((BOTTOM=$(identify -format '%h' $PATH_IN) - $PAD))

  STRING="$(exifshort $PATH_IN)"
  echo -e "\nBurning exif data to image"
  convert -pointsize $FONT_SIZE -fill yellow -draw "text 10,$BOTTOM '$STRING'" $PATH_IN $PATH_OUT
  echo -e "\nBurning watermark to image"
  convert -pointsize $FONT_SIZE -fill yellow -draw "text $RIGHT,$BOTTOM 'karnsonline.com'" $PATH_OUT $PATH_OUT
}

Running the scripts

To show the short version of a photos metadata you can run the following command:

$ exifshort path/to/image/file.jpg

To burn the short version of the photos metadata to the image, run the following command:

burnexif path/to/image/file.jpg

The result will be a new image sitting right next to your source image with the addition of -processed to the file name. This script WILL NOT modify the original image source.