Image metadata

[AndyBiggs]

Hi all,

First post - great to see an online community building up behind a superb offline group of users.

I'm trying to work with a series of images, which all have metadata embedded (predominently want the lat, long, to do some geo spatial work) - anyone got any ideas how I can pull that metadata off the images?

Cheers,

Andy

[AndyBiggs]

Hey Adam,

This is outstanding - thanks so much!!

I was leaning towards running something at the command line, but I was intrigued whether there was native functionality I could use (I'm usually not good enough at exploring what else Alteryx can do), but in that time you'd already solved it for me!!

Cheers,

Andy

[aristiguieta]

Hello Adam, 

I'm trying to run your ExIf Reader macro, but I think I'm missing some of the secret sauce. Can you help me figure out how to make it work?

1st layer: When I try your workflow directly, I get an error on the macro reading

"Error: EXIFReader (3): Tool #2: Record #1: Tool #1: Error opening C:\Users\FARIST~1\AppData\Local\Temp\1\Engine_15128_3fc4e2d689a446b1b33f4b3ceeb0ea62_\out.txt: no fields found."

2nd Layer: So I unpacked the macro and are able to manually update the directory on the first tool - which reads all 10 files (only 5 are JPG). The directory tool reads a number of attributes (name, short name, etc.), but none of the image ones. Moreover, I get a new error, on the second tool (Macro).

"Error: EXIFBatch (2): Record #1: Tool #1: Error opening C:\Users\FARIST~1\AppData\Local\Temp\1\Engine_9860_1309884feee14c73858ead44af4ec35a_\out.txt: no fields found."

3rd Layer:  So I unpack that macro, and at this level I get 2 errors on the Run command tool:

"Error: Run Command (18): A command to run is required unless both Input and Output are valid."
"Error: Run Command (1): File not found "C:\Users\FARIST~1\AppData\Local\Temp\1\Engine_4304_0c9b61b52562487e8a1c2ed008acffe2_\out.txt"

So I wonder if there is something I should be running that is missing on my machine. Any chance you can just send me a copy of your workflow (no dynamic inputs) so that I can be sure I'm not missing any steps?

Thanks!

Francisco

[aristiguieta]

@AdamR_AYX 

(forgot to tag you on my question above - I think I'm missing the command I need to run - can you help?)

[aristiguieta]

@joshuaburkhow 

Josh, this is the macro I was talking about - mage metadata reader - I've been peeling layers of macros, but I still dont get to the secret sauce (command to run or other trick I'm missing). 

If you can make this work, would you please let me know what you did/how you did? 

I'll pay on (chocolate) gold coins!

😃

[joshuaburkhow]

So what @AdamR_AYX built here is fairly straightforward but as you have found out can get tricky. I will hope to do Adam justice here and explain what he built (I apologize profusely if I get it wrong!). 

First off - You want to make sure that once you have opened the yxzp file (I just right click and use 7zip to 'extract here') that you have all the files and they are located in the same folder (this might be where your problems start 😉 )

Second, the "magic" lies inside the "EXIFBatch" macro. You saw the 2nd tool the run command. Well that macro is taking your image name(s) and via the control parameter creating a new .bat file for each image and then the run command runs the exiftool.exe by giving the bat file (aka run.bat) and then the output from running the bat file gets put into the "out.txt" file and passed along in the macro for further processing. Adam uses the %temp% directory which you can get to by running the macro then going to the results and right clicking on the run.bat or out.txt file like this:

Does this help you? Let me know and I can go further. Again - kudos to @AdamR_AYX for building this. I hope others see how relatively easy it is to build any macro to use an external exe

[aristiguieta]

Awesome @joshuaburkhow , glad I asked!

... I must have missed the executable on the extract, but it is working now. Thanks!

... and thanks to @AdamR_AYX for taking this on to begin with! ...

😃

[Sar_Copp]

Does anyone have a version that works with Alteryx Designer v 2019.4.

It works fine on v 2018.1 but doesn't open in the newer one. The macro just comes up with a black square and question mark

[aristiguieta]

... I'm not on 19.4 yet ...(sorry)