What is the EXIF Meta Information in my Digital Camera Picture Files?

“Meta-Data” is data about data. In the case of digital camera photos, this means information about the date & time that a photo was taken, the camera itself, the camera settings, the lens and the lens settings, etc.

Typical information that you might want to exploit for naming your photos include:

• the shooting date and time
• the make and model of the camera
• the make and model of the lens
• exposure settings, such as aperture, focal length, exposure time, ISO, etc..
• flash information
• information about the size and the color space, etc.

A Better Finder Rename supports this type of meta-data in a very wide variety of image, photo & formats, for instance:

• JPEG, HEIC, HEIF, PNG, TIFF, etc.
• CR2, CR3, NEF, RAF, MRW, DNG, SRF, SR2, etc.

As well as in many common video formats.

The support is constantly expanding, so the best way of making sure that your particular camera’s format is supported is to just try it in the latest A Better Finder Rename version.

You can exploit this meta-data in a variety of ways. The simplest is to use it for sorting your photos in chronological order when using the sequence number actions. You can also use it to add the shooting date to the file name by using the Date & Time actions and selecting Digital Camera EXIF Shooting Date as the source of the date information.

You can use the actions in the Tag category to add information such as <ImageWidth>, <CameraMake>, <LensModel>, etc. and you can construct your own preferred date format using tags such as <ShootingDate0Hour12>, etc.

##Embedded vs File System Meta-Data

It is important to understand that this meta-data is usually embedded in the actual file, rather than a file system attribute.

You will for instance often see the terms file creation date, file modification date and EXIF Digital Camera Date.

The first two are file system attributes, that means that they are additional fields in the file system catalog, the place where the file system keeps information about which parts of your storage media holds which files, what they are called, etc.. So the file creation and modification dates are not part of the file itself, but are kept apart from it.

If you move or copy the file from one storage medium to another, this information may or may not be copied.

Embedded Meta-data, such as the Digital Camera EXIF Shooting Date on the other hand is part of the file itself. When you copy or move the file, that data is copied and moved with it.

Composite Date

The Digital Camera EXIF Shooting Date is not one specific field, but it is a composite of various embedded timestamps.

When the DateTimeOriginal field that is part of the EXIF standard is present, this is taken. If not, A Better Finder Rename will start looking into the DateTimeDigitized field and then move on to more file format-specific meta-data fields.

In this manner, you can process various file formats that have different meta-data together as if they all had the same meta-data. Knowing that this happens can help you make sense of some weird behaviours that you might not otherwise be able to interpret.

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