Digital image post processing: Question on adding data to a photo

[popeyespappy]

I’ve got a young lady in Atlanta doing an inventory of the National Park Service’s Martin Luther King Collection. One of the requirements is photography of about 1200 items in the collection that the Park Service doesn’t currently have good digital photographs of. I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction of a method of adding data to a JPG file. We will be capturing the images as RAW (NEF since the camera is a NIKON D750) and JPG. The customer’s requirement is Tiff and JPG. We need to batch convert the RAW files to Tiff. That part is easy enough, but we also need to add the object’s accession number and a date to the JPG. The end result needs to look like this.



I need to add the black rectangle with the object name and data. Are there any tools available that would let us add the data we need to the digital file’s metadata then extract it out and put it in the JPG in a batch process. Can we do it in real time with a laptop connected to the camera? Are we stuck with doing that manually one photo at a time in Photoshop or something?

[possibletarian]

Have you tried this ?
https://www.arclab.com/en/watermarkstudio/

There is a free trial

[popeyespappy]

Thanks! I'll look into that. It sounds like what I need.

[bennyboy]

I've got some experience in doing stuff like this. Photoshop has macros, or it's actually fairly easy just to write a Windows program that will do this. It should be trivially simple to add a text box to an existing image. I might be coerced into helping, actually, since it sounds like an important project.

My first question would be-- where is the data coming from? Are you entering it by hand on a per item basis? Is the data already in a spreadsheet or database, and you are just adding the images to match? Are the numbers sequential (in which case you could generate the complete list auomatically in Excel, save it to a file, and use a dropdown menu to just pick which ID goes with which image)? Are the images all the same size and orientation?

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

[popeyespappy]

I've got some experience in doing stuff like this.  Photoshop has macros, or it's actually fairly easy just to write a Windows program that will do this.  It should be trivially simple to add a text box to an existing image.  I might be coerced into helping, actually, since it sounds like an important project.

My first question would be-- where is the data coming from?  Are you entering it by hand on a per item basis?  Is the data already in a spreadsheet or database, and you are just adding the images to match?  Are the numbers sequential (in which case you could generate the complete list auomatically in Excel, save it to a file, and use a dropdown menu to just pick which ID goes with which image)?  Are the images all the same size and orientation?

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

After looking at some of the tools yesterday I think this is probably the way to go. It is kind of what I had in mind to begin with. I'm just not a Photoshop kinda guy so I don't know how to pull it off. Neither does the museum technician we hired for the project. As far as coercing goes I could probably pay you to consult if you are interested. I just need to make sure that wouldn't be a problem first since this is a for the government. I wouldn't want to get in trouble with Girly for hiring a North Korean spy to insert fractals into the JPG's that upload a virus into the Park Service server that burns down the Smithsonian. My available budget isn't unlimited though...

There is a spreadsheet, and we are adding images to match. The numbers are for the most part sequential, but the photos will not be taken in order since the items are randomly located in four different locations. The customer also already has photos of about 90 of the 1258 objects. These will not need to be photographed again, but the accession numbers for these objects aren't sequencial. There are columns in the spreadsheet for accession number, inventory date and item condition among others. The text we need to insert is the accession number and the inventory date. It might be nice if we could embed the item condition in the exif (my new word of the day yesterday) data too, but that is just an idea, not a requirement. What I see in my mind goes go something like this:

1. Complete the inventory (A lot of this is already done)
2. Photograph the objects (this won't start until after the first of the year)
2a. The images will be captured in NEF (Nikon RAW) and JPG
2b. We can at this point name (rename) the photos manually to match the accession number if there isn't an easy way to do that later in the process
3. Batch convert the NEF images to TIFF (rename the images if we didn't do that earlier)
4. Insert the watermarks and edit the exif data
5. Batch convert the TIFF images to JPG (the deliverable is both formats, edited and unedited)
6. Profit???

If you are interested in consulting let me know, and we'll talk offline. I see your part as developing the macro and showing Becca and/or me how to use it.

[Anomalocaris]

I’ve got a young lady in Atlanta doing an inventory of the National Park Service’s Martin Luther King Collection. One of the requirements is photography of about 1200 items in the collection that the Park Service doesn’t currently have good digital photographs of. I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction of a method of adding data to a JPG file. We will be capturing the images as RAW (NEF since the camera is a NIKON D750) and JPG. The customer’s requirement is Tiff and JPG. We need to batch convert the RAW files to Tiff. That part is easy enough, but we also need to add the object’s accession number and a date to the JPG. The end result needs to look like this.



I need to add the black rectangle with the object name and data. Are there any tools available that would let us add the data we need to the digital file’s metadata then extract it out and put it in the JPG in a batch process. Can we do it in real time with a laptop connected to the camera? Are we stuck with doing that manually one photo at a time in Photoshop or something?

I took the liberty of re-posing your question anonymously at a Digital darkroom forum.

[popeyespappy]

I took the liberty of re-posing your question anonymously at a Digital darkroom forum.

Thanks. I've bookmarked the link. I'll join the forum if the thread gets any hits.

[bennyboy]

I've got some experience in doing stuff like this.  Photoshop has macros, or it's actually fairly easy just to write a Windows program that will do this.  It should be trivially simple to add a text box to an existing image.  I might be coerced into helping, actually, since it sounds like an important project.

My first question would be-- where is the data coming from?  Are you entering it by hand on a per item basis?  Is the data already in a spreadsheet or database, and you are just adding the images to match?  Are the numbers sequential (in which case you could generate the complete list auomatically in Excel, save it to a file, and use a dropdown menu to just pick which ID goes with which image)?  Are the images all the same size and orientation?

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

After looking at some of the tools yesterday I think this is probably the way to go. It is kind of what I had in mind to begin with. I'm just not a Photoshop kinda guy so I don't know how to pull it off. Neither does the museum technician we hired for the project. As far as coercing goes I could probably pay you to consult if you are interested. I just need to make sure that wouldn't be a problem first since this is a for the government. I wouldn't want to get in trouble with Girly for hiring a North Korean spy to insert fractals into the JPG's that upload a virus into the Park Service server that burns down the Smithsonian. My available budget isn't unlimited though...

There is a spreadsheet, and we are adding images to match. The numbers are for the most part sequential, but the photos will not be taken in order since the items are randomly located in four different locations. The customer also already has photos of about 90 of the 1258 objects. These will not need to be photographed again, but the accession numbers for these objects aren't sequencial. There are columns in the spreadsheet for accession number, inventory date and item condition among others. The text we need to insert is the accession number and the inventory date. It might be nice if we could embed the item condition in the exif (my new word of the day yesterday) data too, but that is just an idea, not a requirement. What I see in my mind goes go something like this:

1. Complete the inventory (A lot of this is already done)
2. Photograph the objects (this won't start until after the first of the year)
2a. The images will be captured in NEF (Nikon RAW) and JPG
2b. We can at this point name (rename) the photos manually to match the accession number if there isn't an easy way to do that later in the process
3. Batch convert the NEF images to TIFF (rename the images if we didn't do that earlier)
4. Insert the watermarks and edit the exif data
5. Batch convert the TIFF images to JPG (the deliverable is both formats, edited and unedited)
6. Profit???

If you are interested in consulting let me know, and we'll talk offline. I see your part as developing the macro and showing Becca and/or me how to use it.

It sounds like an interesting project.  I don't think Photoshop is the right tool for this job-- straight-up Windows programming should be much better, because it allows for complete control.

As for security, probably the easiest way around that would be for me to provide source code along with the executable.  Then it can pretty easily be determined that there's nothing fishy going on.  To be honest, I don't think the whole project will need more than a couple hundred lines of code.

I also use images at work (pictures for making test questions for English), so I can benefit later by my work on this project.

[popeyespappy]

1. Complete the inventory (A lot of this is already done)
2. Photograph the objects (this won't start until after the first of the year)
2a. The images will be captured in NEF (Nikon RAW) and JPG
2b. We can at this point name (rename) the photos manually to match the accession number if there isn't an easy way to do that later in the process
3. Batch convert the NEF images to TIFF (rename the images if we didn't do that earlier)
4. Insert the watermarks and edit the exif data
5. Batch convert the TIFF images to JPG (the deliverable is both formats, edited and unedited)
6. Profit???

It sounds like an interesting project.  I don't think Photoshop is the right tool for this job-- straight-up Windows programming should be much better, because it allows for complete control.

Can you do 2b through 5 in windows without accessing Photoshop or something similar? i.e. inserting the watermark and format conversions? What kind of hardware and software requirements would the user have to run the program?

I going to PM my work email so we can take this offline if you want.

[popeyespappy]

With 1200 items, I'd definitely recommend spending some time getting the exact right tool for your process, because that's a lot of elbow grease you're talking about there.

All done! 2036 different images each in NEF, TIF, and JPG formats. About 311 GB total.

The tools I used were Fastone Image Viewer, ExifTool and a spreadsheet. Faststone Image Viewer to batch convert the NEF images to TIF and JPG. It also inserted the metadata for item number and date photographed into the photo during the conversion process. I used the excel concatenate command to build command lines then saved them as batch files to rename everything. Only had to write one command then drag it down the column to create thousands of commands. Then built the commands to edit the EXIF data the same way. Those batch files used the ExifTool to edit the EXIF data to add the inventory information to each photo.

I spent about three days total on it, but a lot of that time was spent debugging Becca's spreadsheet that cross referenced the original photograph filename with the park's object number. Once that was straight it was mostly just waiting on FastStone to do the conversions. The 8144 lines of command line stuff went really fast.