comparison of ExifTool, ExofPro and digikam - pros and cons for preparation for camtrapR

[David Nicholls]

Dear Group

I have used ExifPro (a windows application) to manage and tag my camera trap images since 2011.  It does a great job especially the tool "Copy tagged images" and its option of creating sub folders for each set of tags. I use it to create a station folder and it creates a set of species folders within (provided there is only tag (the species) per image). Certainly I have to manually process each station set of images, a pain but manageable.

From here it is simple to use camtrapR::recordTable with the Directory and the imageDirectory arguments. 

This has saved me having to retag all my images and or use the hierarchical tagging when I belatedly got to camtrapR. 

I am unwilling to go to ExifTools - I cannot manage its command line interface. 

So I looked at digikam.  I cannot see a way to replicate the function provided by "Copy tagged images".  Is there there such a facility?  If I start using a hierarchal tags in digikam is there a good workflow to bring such tagged images into camtrapR?

Thanks 

David

[Fabiola Iannarilli]

Hi David,

I am not sure this is what you are looking for. If you want to select the images by tag and then copy only the selected ones, in Digikam you can filter by tag, select those images and then just use ctrl+C to copy them to a new locations. This can be very tediuos and time consuming because it needs to be done folder by folder.

If your ultimate goal instead is to have all the pictures of a certain species in a specific folder, the best option is to use digikam to tag the species, then extract the tag information using the regular workflow and creating the recordTable object in camtrapR. Finally, use the function getSpeciesImages to get all the pictures of a certain species organized by camera site.

Fabiola

[David Nicholls]

Many thanks Fabiola.  I am grateful for the reassurance. Most helpful.

In addition to those two tasks, EXIFPro does one more high value and essential task for me.

In one menu selection (after the images are species-tagged), it copies all the tagged images, to an existing or newly created station folder. EXIFPro copies all the tagged images and, species by species, puts them into subfolders labeled with the species name within the station folder.

This is the directory structure, camtrapR::recordTable uses to create the recordTable using the argument IDfrom = “directory" in preference to the  IDfrom = “metadata” argument.

It is this third functionality I seek in digikam. Is it there?

Kind regards

D

[Juergen Niedballa]

Hi,

I am not aware of a digiKam tool to automatically create directories based on tags.

A few alternatives:

1. tag images in digiKam and set argument IDfrom = "metadata" (in recordTable). This way you don't need directories at all and can go straight from digiKam to camtrapR.

2. getSpeciesImages, as Fabiola suggested. Can be run in a loop over multiple species. If run with an existing recordTable, it should be relatively fast.

Best,

Jürgen

[David Nicholls]

Many thanks, Jurgen.

I’ll try solution 1.  I can see this is the better system - but I have to bring my staff with me.  I’ll investigate solution 2.  I don’t understand that yet, but I'll try.

David