cannot show EXIF creation date as a column in list view

[over 5000]

Binary package hint: nautilus

As nautilus can handle EXIF data (you can view it for single files in the files' properties dialogs) it should also show data - e.g. capture dates (DateTimeOriginal) - for multiple files, by providing columns for the list view.
This could also be used for preview icon markings in the symbol view, in the way that you can already show meta data like the file size, when increasing the symbol size above 100%.

See also this brainstorm idea: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5211/

Showing photo capture date has become especially important since the change from gnome-vfs to gvfs, as gvfs changes the "modified datetime" when merely copying (but not otherwise changing) files.
With gnome-vfs, the modified date could be taken as capture/creation date, since it was kept when copying the photos from the digital camera / SD card to the local file system.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532536

[over 5000 (over5000-deactivatedaccount)]

With a short python script, it's easily possible to add a column like that. (In brainstorm, others wished for width x height columns...)

The problem I see, though, is that this way for each column every picture's exif data would be read again. Is there a way to read the exif metadata once and store it for the other columns to use?

The attached script requires python-nautilus and python-pyexiv2 and needs to be copied to ~/.nautilus/python-extensions (or /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0/python/, which I didn't test, though.)

[over 5000 (over5000-deactivatedaccount)]

Fix: removed the "[exception]" for non-jpeg files.

Stuff that should be done:
* Show those columns only if there are photos with exif data in the folder.
* Format the date in the way it's formatted in the "modified" column.
* Read files only once instead of several times if there are multiple exif related columns.
* Localize

[over 5000 (over5000-deactivatedaccount)]

Adding several columns does not work. The second one overwrites the first one when adding itself.

None of the columns is shown when their tickmark is ticked.
If one of the tickmarks is ticked, then the columns window closed and reopened - suddenly both are ticked.

Or is this a bug in my scripts? (attached below)

[Tyler Rick (tyler.rick)]

Hi kbit,

I think the reason you had trouble using both of those extensions at the same time is that they both had the same class name (ColumnExtension). If you gave each class a different name, I bet it would work for you.

But I didn't see any reason to break this up into two different extensions in the first place, so I've combined them into a single extension class (see attached). Thanks for laying the groundwork for this--it sure saved me some time!

[Artemy Vysotsky (artemyv)]

I'd like to note that here https://code.launchpad.net/~team1 there is a script that adds a bigger set of columns for pictures as well as some info columns for audio files containing ID3 tags