Where are comments stored?

[Renegade]

Hey Mouser,

Where are comments stored in the image files? Which EXIF metadata fields are you using?

I want to search through screenshots, but I don't want to actually browse and look at them. I just want to type in a URL of a site or a program title name and run a text search.

Depending on available time, I figure it might be a fun little NANY project for me to do a mini-search program. I need it anyways, so might as well. It's also a nice kind of project as I can GPL it or WTFPL it as I won't need to use any proprietary components like I've had to do for some other stuff.

Anyways, just need to know the fields there.

Thanks!

[tomos]

Depending on available time, I figure it might be a fun little NANY project for me to do a mini-search program. I need it anyways, so might as well. It's also a nice kind of project as I can GPL it or WTFPL it as I won't need to use any proprietary components like I've had to do for some other stuff.

-Renegade (September 27, 2013, 11:48 PM)

could this tie in with the SC viewer idea?

[Renegade]

That doesn't look related to what I want to do. I'm really only interested in searching for images based on the text comments. I use SC all the time, but it's impossible to search through all of the screenshots sanely by browsing. I'm way too lazy for that. I'd rather just type in something and get a list of possibilities.

[bob99]

I was looking for a way to do this some time ago. Can't seem to find my old post at the moment to reference. But did find this one. May be of help.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34092.msg320320#msg320320

[Renegade]

I was looking for a way to do this some time ago. Can't seem to find my old post at the moment to reference. But did find this one. May be of help.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34092.msg320320#msg320320

-bob99 (September 28, 2013, 11:42 AM)

That kind of helps, but it's a really messy solution. It searches the entire file, and not just the comments, so if you're searching for a short string, you're fairly likely to get some false positives.

Guess I'll just need to peek into the files themselves when I have time.

[mouser]

Sorry for the late reply -- it's a great idea to have a tool that will search screenshot captor comments.

The comments should be in the EXIF field for comments.  I think "Description" may be the name of the EXIF field.
To confirm I uploaded an image file to: http://regex.info/exif.cgi

Regarding making a new tool -- i wonder if there aren't already good existing tools for this, since any tool that will search EXIF fields in images should work to search screenshot captor screenshots.

[Renegade]

Sorry for the late reply -- it's a great idea to have a tool that will search screenshot captor comments.

The comments should be in the EXIF field for comments.  I think "Description" may be the name of the EXIF field.
To confirm I uploaded an image file to: http://regex.info/exif.cgi

Regarding making a new tool -- i wonder if there aren't already good existing tools for this, since any tool that will search EXIF fields in images should work to search screenshot captor screenshots.

-mouser (September 29, 2013, 12:02 AM)

I don't know of any that do it.

From a quick look, I found some gallery software for web sites that can search metadata, which isn't really what I'm looking for.

Viewers that I've used don't do it. (Tried a few and tired of playing with image viewers.)

To be honest, I'm not going to put another second into looking. It's just too painful. In the time it would take me to actually look for software, compare and test, I could write it myself.

If anyone knows something that works nicely, I'd go for that, but I'm simply tired of looking for software and finding that there's nothing out there that does what I want - it's a perpetual exercise in frustration.

Most software does not work as advertised unless the stars are all aligned properly, there's a full moon, no cloud cover, sufficient rain without clouds, and you've got enough chickens to sacrifice.

Yes - I'm migrating to a LAMP stack server... pain pain pain pain pain...

[mouser]

To be honest, I'm not going to put another second into looking. It's just too painful. In the time it would take me to actually look for software, compare and test, I could write it myself.

i hear ya!

well maybe you found your NANY for this year?

[rgdot]

FWIW, XnView has search (Tools-->Search) that includes searching EXIF but when I tried the SC comments they are not EXIF, at least not to XnView

[Renegade]

FWIW, XnView has search (Tools-->Search) that includes searching EXIF but when I tried the SC comments they are not EXIF, at least not to XnView

-rgdot (September 29, 2013, 01:42 AM)

EXIF is an area where I've consistently found software sorely lacking. There are GREAT libraries to help out with it all, but... their implementations in different programs are often lacking.

[kfitting]

You can try EXIFTool GUI, a GUI for Phil Harvey's excellent EXIFTools.  In any case, a NANY entry could use ExifTools to handle all the file interactions.  I think development of this particular GUI has stopped, but there are others out there.  I cant think of any tags not handled by EXIFTools. (double negative intended...)

[bob99]

FWIW, XnView has search (Tools-->Search) that includes searching EXIF but when I tried the SC comments they are not EXIF, at least not to XnView

-rgdot (September 29, 2013, 01:42 AM)

EXIF is an area where I've consistently found software sorely lacking. There are GREAT libraries to help out with it all, but... their implementations in different programs are often lacking.

-Renegade (September 29, 2013, 02:37 AM)

Still couldn't locate my old post to reference but I know it's around somewhere. Anyway, I also tried a number of different programs to search for comments data. And I also wanted to try and generate a catalog or list of sorts with the filename, date and the comments o saved with the screenshot. It seemed like it should be pretty easy but wasn't.

From what I remember, the comments are stored in the Exif data. But, the field name (tag in Exif lingo) is different for file types. Jpg,png,etc. While reading up on Exif data formats I learned it seemed to be more beneficial to photographers for camera settings etc than for comments, descriptions fields/tags. No consistency.

For me at the time, it ended up it took less time manually going through and creating my own lists than trying the different progs and figuring out a way to do it.

I think it would be a great NANY app contribution.
I'll be watching this thread to see if anything new comes out.