EXIF fun and some F-Spot

I recently started playing around with F-Spot, an application for personal photo management for Gnome. The functionality of the program looks promising and might end up being the program we use to manage our photos. After all, we do have enough of them… But don’t get me wrong, F-Spot still needs quite a bit of work before it’ll be usable for the masses.

What interested me and got me to start hacking with the F-Spot code was the ability to export to Original galleries. During the export I noticed one interesting problem with the EXIF data that is saved in the image. Most applications use the EXIF field DateTime as the time when the picture was taken when the EXIF specification clearly states that it is the file change date and time. What should instead be used is the attribute DateTimeOriginal. The attribute DateTimeDigitized could also be used for images from digital cameras, but with scanned images it won’t work (as it should state when the image was digitized).

F-spot correctly changes the DateTime of the images output to Original galleries (as the filenames are changed), but I wonder why no other image manipulation program that I’ve used changes it. I do know that I’ll have to revisit the code that creates the Life of Jalo so that the correct attribute is displayed just in case image manipulation programs start working like they’re supposed to.