First and foremost, thank you for your amazing work. I have been using RPD for quite some time now and I really appreciate your constant efforts to improve your program!
I searched the forum and to my surprise the topic of automatically GPS tagging pictures on Download did not come up yet.
Would it be feasible to implement a feature to extract GPS positions from a GPX file and automatically write the corresponding coordinates into the EXIF of the downloaded pictures? There should be an option to manually set a time offset between the camera’s time and the GPS time.
The absolute killer-feature would be to extract the time offset automatically from a picture taken of the GPS-devices time (e.g. smartphone clock). But thats just me dreaming
EDIT: I read in a different thread, that you ask for suggestions on how to integrate a feature into the UI.
I was thinking about a separate menu, either an extra window opened from the main menu or a separate “Metadata” tab in the right column.
This menu should contain a checkbox “Geotag from file” an “load GPX file” dialog and a “time offset” text field with a clear description of the input format and the direction (i.e. camera time is greater than (actual) GPS time → negative offset).
Additionally, as a more realistic idea for the auto-offset detection, there could be either an option “select picture to determine offset” where you can select a picture of some clock, enter the shown time and the offset is automatically calculated from the EXIF data. This could be also an item in a picture’s context menu.
I realize that RPD is not meant for meta data manipulation but I feel that it would be a great addtition to the functionality, if there was a way to change some metadata upon import.
If you are considering this feature request, I would be happy to come up with a more detailed concept.
But before doing that, how much demand is there for it these days? Is there some way to determine how many people separately log GPS tracks? The GPS units I have on my Canon cameras bake the location data into the RAW files, so it’s been many years since I’ve had to think about loading GPS log files. I guess that’s fairly common these days.
Given the possibly low demand for the feature, please think about who would implement this feature, and if they would want to be funded to do it. I do not have the time to volunteer my time for it at the moment.
When I find myself some spare time, I will come up with a concept. I am also looking at the source to determine whether I could implement such a feature myself.
As for the demand, I have a Sony a6000 and a7ii, both have no build in GPS. As far as I am aware, no Sony camera has build in GPS right now. Although the newer (a7iii and later) models have bluetooth and allow GPS logging using a bluetooth connection to a smartphone.
In general, build in GPS seems to be restricted to the high-end segment. And I wonder if the impact on battery life of an integrated GPS receiver might be an argument to prefer a separate GPS logging solution.
That being said, I believe that the necessary framework to change EXIF information on import is basically there since you are using exiftool anyways to extract information. Setting up a framework for EXIF manipulation would furthermore allow to implement more tagging features in the future, as this has been requested before (Tagging feature request - #5 by Guillermo_Kirsch).
The problem I see with this (adding GPS and EXIF information in general) is that for many people modifying the RAW file is a no-no. Just because of that I don’t see a lot of adoption unless there is the option to save those modifications to a sidecar file in a standard way, compatible with darktable/rawtherapee/digikam etc.
I suggest including in the concept proposal why it’s better for Rapid Photo Downloader to do it, rather than one of the many specialized geotagging programs out there.
I had no idea. I’m especially surprised their sports camera doesn’t have it.
I guess that’s up to the individual user. But as someone who has had an important image fail to geotag due to a battery on an external GPS device running out without me noticing, I’d have to say I strongly prefer a system that uses the camera’s battery! But then again my camera is not mirrorless so battery life is generally not a problem for me. I suppose for mirrorless cameras with constrained battery lives the external options might be more attractive.
Exiv2 is the default choice, with ExifTool only as a fall back. ExifTool is far slower. Some users download tens of thousands of files at a time (e.g. time lapse), so speed is truly important.
As I have said before, allowing for features like keyword tagging on import basically means writing a FOSS version of Photo Mechanic, which is the gold standard for photographers. Now that is a massive undertaking! Which probably explains why no one has done it.
Not just RAW files. Any solution that modifies jpeg metadata must first back up the jpegs, and work only on a copy of the original.
The absolute low-point for Rapid Photo Downloader was back when it used to call an external program to rotate jpegs, which was a popular feature request at the time. It turned out that for period of some months, the external program would actually corrupt the maker metadata for a certain manufacturer (Olympus as I dimly recall). Automatic jpeg rotation was on by default in Rapid Photo Downloader. Because Rapid Photo Downloader did not backup the jpeg before calling the external program to apply the rotation, a portion of the jpeg metadata was damaged without recourse to fix it. Yikes.
And here we find the standards fall apart as an actual standard, because at least some developers do their own incompatible thing because they think the Adobe XMP metadata standard is stupid. This is a royal pain the butt.
Perhaps someone has written a utility program to modify XMP files to match the expectations of each program?
