Our great sponsors
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
-
osxphotos
Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata.
ExifTool[0] does all that from the command line. I use it for automating my photo organization workflow and, as a bonus, I use it for reading the metadata of damn near any filetype.
[0]: https://exiftool.org
You're right they don't usually include that many significant digits. Here is an example sample of some GPS data I specifically extracted from a cross-country bike trip from photos I took on my phone, for comparison:
https://github.com/lelandbatey/batey_bike_trip_records/blob/...
Know that although ExifTool is written in perl, you can run it in "batch mode" which makes it quite fast--only a couple of ms to parse a file. I've written an open source library to manage the subprocesses for you if you're using node.js (and I also wrote the ruby variant ages ago):
https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js
I'm the author of the osxphotos[0] tool mentioned in the article. For photos in an Apple Photos library, osxphotos gives you access to a rich set of metadata beyond what's in the actual EXIF/IPTC/XMP of the image. Apple performs object classification and other AI techniques on your images but generally doesn't expose this to the user. For example, photos are categorized as to object in them (dog, cat, breed of dog, etc.), rich reverse geolocation info (neighborhood, landmarks, etc.) and an interesting set of scores such as "overall aesthetic", "pleasant camera tilt", "harmonious colors", etc. These can be queried using osxphotos, either from the command line, or in your own python code. (Ref API docs[1])
For example, to find your "best" photos based on overall aesthetic score and add them to the album "Best Photos" you could run:
osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall > 0.8" --add-to-album "Best Photos"
To find good photos with trees in them you could try something like:
osxphotos query --query-eval "photo.score.overall > 0.5" --label Tree --add-to-album "Good Tree Photos"
There's quite a bit of other interesting data in Photos that you can explore with osxphotos. Run `osxphotos inspect` and it will show you all the metadata for whichever photo is currently selected in the Photos app.
[0] https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos