Reveal 1.2 review
DownloadReveal project is an easy to use, cross platform EXIF metadata viewer with limited editing capabilities. Reveal was designed to pr
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Reveal project is an easy to use, cross platform EXIF metadata viewer with limited editing capabilities.
Reveal was designed to present as many details about how a photo was taken in a clear and easy to understand format.
I'm finally letting the cat out of the bag. Today I've released Reveal 1.0, a tiny yet very powerful EXIF metadata viewer and editor. Since I'm putting Reveal and Album Shaper 2.2 screenshots on the same page I suppose I'll point out that you can view those here, which includes a great deal of spoilers for the next Album Shaper release.
Reveal kept me busy for a long time.
What started out as adding Exif support to Album Shaper grew, and grew, and grew. Originally I wanted Album Shaper to auto rotate photos during import, which it now does using the CVS code, in addition to being able to show EXIF metadata somehow. EXIF metadata is stored in just about every digital photo, encoding how the photo was taken (f-stop, shutter speed, ISO sensativity, date and time, etc), as well as various processing options (sharpness, saturation, contrast), what white balance was used, if the flash fired, and much much more.
EXIF was designed to keep track of all that stuff for you, but to date looking up how a photo was taken is a rather difficult error prone process. There are a number of text-based EXIF viewers out there. Usually you're prsented with a long list of fields and values, often uninterpreted, and in now particular order. If you're camera didn't record a value but you know it and you'd like to enter it your our of luck. If you scanned in a photo you can guarantee such data is not present. Furthermore, most camera makers tend to hide a great deal of the details in proprietary Makernote entries, despite the fact that very good standard Exif tags exist. Jeesh!
Reveal is intended to be a breath of fresh air. I've selected the settings I think most people will be interested in (shutter speed, aperature, ISO sensativity, flash status/mode, shooting mode, metering mode, focus mode, sensor type, subject distance, focal length and 35mm equiv, digital zoom factor, white balance mode, and contrast, saturation, and sharpness settings).
These fields have been organized into groups of four and annotated with nice icons that reflect the value of a particular field. More generate fields like the date and time a photo was taken, the camera used to take it, the copyright holder and photographer, in addition to any known photo modifications are presented in a primary summary pane. For those of you who would like to get direct access to the Exif data you can do so under a details pane that clearly separates entries using alternating colors.
While I'd like to think Reveal is a step ahead in terms of usability, in terms of functionality there are a number of advances. Reveal is built on top of the Qt and Exiv2 libraries so it's cross platform.
Today I'm providing Windows and Mac OSX binaries in addition to the source. I've gotten it running under Gentoo Linux so if anyone would like to produce packages for various distributions please send them my way. The OS X binary requires OS X 10.3.9 or later or 10.4 of course. I should be able to add support for 10.2 users in the future if the demand is there.
At this time Reveal does not support internationalization, but a version will be released that supports i18n along side the next Album Shaper release. I'd like to think the editing capabilities in addition to Reveal's ability to decipher a good deal of proprietary Makernote data will also be appreciated. So enjoy.
Reveal will also be embedded in the next release of Album Shaper as a photo info window that can be pulled up at any time similar to a layers dialog in many image editors.
I'd like to also thank Pavel Nemec for putting together Album Shaper 2.1 Suse pacakges. Hopefully Album Shaper will even been included on Suse discs in the future. One can only hope.
What's New in This Release:
Major Improvements:
Added read support for: (*not fully tested)
+PNG*
+TIFF
+ARW (Sony)
+CR2 (Canon)
+DNG (Adobe)
+NEF (Nikon)
+PEF (Pentax)
+MRW (Konica Minolta)
+SR2* (Sony)
+THM (Canon)
Date, time, and numbering formatting performed using system locale
Significantly improved animation when expanding/collapsing photo thumbnails
Rewrote about window
Bumped Qt to version 4.2
Bumped Exiv2 to version 0.11
Auto rotated embededded jpeg thumbnails now visible in the Details pane.
Added Description viewing/editing support
Minor Improvements:
Recognize lesser used .jpeg extension
Report file sizes using correct suffixes for *bytes, aka MB instead of Mb, an so on
When editing time, minutes line edit shows leading 0 when minutes are
Reveal 1.2 keywords