"Exif Notes": Android app for logging film shots

Hi Forum,

 

I know that Classic Manual Cameras is probably at the Luddite end of the Photo.net spectrum, but I thought I'd make a post about an Android app that I've just discovered called "Exif Notes". It's a free app that allows you to log details of your film shots as you take them. This data includes things like: the lens used for a given shot, aperture, shutter speed and even GPS coordinates. You can pre-enter data for all your cameras and lenses so that when you come to log a shot, it's very fast to do so, because for example the ranges of F-stops and shutter speeds for a particular camera/lens combination is already known. Another thing that speeds things up is that for a particular camera, you tell the app which particular lenses may be coupled with it. So, when you click to select the lens used for a given camera, you're given a limited list of lenses that pertain directly to the camera.

 

I don't know much about Exif, but it seems to include standardised image (and audio) metadata types. Flickr, for example, recognises it. While I haven't yet tested this side of Exif Notes, one can export ones shot data as a database file, email it (for example) to the computer where your scans are stored, then use a program called "exiftools" to embed the metadata created by Exif Notes in the associated scanned files. So then when you import a file into Flickr (i imagine also photoshop and lightroom), for example, all the data about apertures, lenses, films and other notes will be included with the image.

 

I'm going to use Exif Notes to make up for a faulty memory, so i know what I did in a particular shot. Hopefully it will improve my photography.

 

So, if you're interested have a look in the Android play store. I don't know if there's a version for iPhones

 

Cheers, All the best!

Sounds interesting. Thanks for the info!

Hopefully it will improve my photography.

 

Thanks for the heads-up, but it probably wouldn't improve mine! While I find metadata useful in the digital world, when it comes to B&W film photography I like to fly by the seat of my pants, and I can't imagine having to pause between shots to enter data into my phone. After all, there's not much to record that would be useful for subsequent expeditions; filters and consequent exposure adjustments, perhaps, and possibly lenses used, but I keep a minimalist photographic diary on my PC to record anything out of the ordinary relating to a particular film and the circumstances under which it was shot. Scans from individual films are filed in individual sub-folders inside a folder devoted to the camera used, and it's easy enough to include a Notepad document along with the scans, outlining problems or peculiarities. As for Flickr, my monochrome images display camera, lens, film and developer as part of the description and tags, and I consider that adequate.

 

When it comes to good 'ol film photography, I guess I'll remain a Luddite a little longer...

Yes, I don't imagine these things are for everyone. I don't develop my own negatives and they come back scanned numbered from 1 to 36. So in the field it should be pretty quick for me to mark shutter speed and aperture, the two things I'm most interested in. Frame number is incremented automatically and lens name will stay on the last value until you change it, when a lens is swapped, so really just a few seconds work and you can respond to WhatsApp messages while you're there! :) Edited March 15, 2018 by escuta

An iPhone/iPad equivalent is "PhotoExif" - has fancier graphics and is a paid app. See: PhotoExif | Photistics

It would definitely be nice to have that information. I just don't think I'd be disciplined enough to record it. I think it's main market is going to be people young enough to be addicted to their phones and old/jaded/cool enough to want to shoot film, which I think is a thin slice of the demographic.

 

Personally, I wish cell phones had never been invented, most of the time, so I'm definitely not their target market. While I see some value to it, I'd rather use a pad and pencil, if I were going to record that data, which I'm not because that would turn a fun activity into work.

About the only time I would, maybe, use this app would be when checking aperture and/or speed settings on my camera. Otherwise, I'd just take paler notes on the rare occasion it might matter.

I've been looking at these options some time back, mainly because I use my scanned images in the same catalog with the images from my digital cameras, and having some EXIF info in the files would be welcome. But as above, the discipline to fill it in after each shot..... not likely going to happen. Even if the app is usable enough, it's just something I'd forget time and time again :-)

 

I tried some other tools on the PC to add camera info, focal length and things like that, but none of them really worked 100% for me. So I guess it's back to keywords in the catalog to try remember what I used for the given roll.

I annotated two rolls of film with this on the weekend. For me, it's quicker to use than pen & paper (easy to use in one hand), but was, I admit, a challenge to annotate between shots as the sun was setting fast. I have a few new lenses and I think it's going to valuable in learning how they behave. How long I'll keep using it I don't know, but being a mildly(?) obsessive type I may continue!

Thanks for the tip - it looks useful and for me better than pen and paper in the field, as it were.

 

The later modern film cameras like the Minolta 7 and 9 recorded camera 'EXIF' data and independently people wrote small programs to transfer the data to JPG files. This article provides link to code and other discussion threads, but this was a long time ago and may be superseded ...

I tend to write down exposure notes with pen and paper on most medium format work, and of course in my very infrequent outings with large format. Even with medium format (8 or 12 frames per roll, as I own no 6x4.5 gear), it's almost too much work. For small format, I'll usually at best write down general notes like "#1 - 19: 50/1.4; #20-37: 28/2.8" or "#15-25 mostly 1/500ish, f/2.8ish", and make exposure notes only on specific very challenging frames where I'm keen to have the exact facts when looking at the negative/picture later. (How else to learn and improve?) I've thought of using something like ExifNotes instead of pen and paper, but the barriers for me include risk of fumbling phone, possibility of dead phone battery, tedious need to unlock phone between frames if greater than my screen lockout time, etc., so I continue with notebooks -- mostly plain blank Field Notes ones, but someone gave me the gift of a few PhotoMemo ones recently.

 

On MF & LF images, I then use Phil Harvey's EXIF Tools (mentioned above), plus some code I wrote myself to run atop it, to encode the camera, lens, ISO/ASA, aperture, and shutter speed from my handwritten notes onto the image files. And I'm not even a young person.

 

--Dave

Maybe I'm just bad or lazy, but one of the reasons I've become more and more reliant on cameras like my N90s, F100, and F5 is BECAUSE they record the EXIF data. Using a software/hardware package called Meta35, it takes a few seconds to pull the data from the camera. The software will then automatically attach it to scans.

 

With that said, I still love my F2s, FM2s, and plenty of other cameras with no or minimal electronics.