From: Petter Reinholdtsen Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2018 21:24:00 +0000 (+0200) Subject: New post. X-Git-Url: https://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/commitdiff_plain/0f960dbe907e0cb5ad8434271102b04116f44416?ds=sidebyside New post. --- diff --git a/blog/data/2018-07-31-exif-photo-rss.txt b/blog/data/2018-07-31-exif-photo-rss.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..424d8c7e68 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/data/2018-07-31-exif-photo-rss.txt @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +Title: Sharing images with friends and family using RSS and EXIF/XMP metadata +Tags: english, debian +Date: 2018-07-31 23:30 + +

For a while now, I have looked for a sensible way to share images +with my family using a self hosted solution, as it is unacceptable to +place images from my personal life under the control of strangers +working for data hoarders like Google or Dropbox. The last few days I +have drafted an approach that might work out, and I would like to +share it with you. I would like to publish images on a server under +my control, and point some Internet connected display units using some +free and open standard to the images I published. Many years ago, I +hoped to find a digital photo frame capable of reading a RSS feed with +image references (aka using the <enclosure> RSS tag), but was +unable to find a sensible supplier of such frames. In the end I gave +up that approach.

+ +

Some months ago, I discovered that +XScreensaver is able to +read images from a RSS feed, and used it to set up a screen saver on +my home info screen, showing images from the Daily images feed from +NASA. This proved to work well. More recently I discovered that +Kodi (both using +OpenELEC and +LibreELEC) provide the +Feedreader +screen saver capable of reading a RSS feed with images and news. For +fun, I used it this summer to test Kodi on my parents TV by hooking up +a Raspberry PI unit with LibreELEC, and wanted to provide them with a +screen saver showing selected pictures from my selection.

+ +

Armed with motivation and a test photo frame, I set out to generate +a RSS feed for the Kodi instance. I adjusted my +Freedombox instance, created +/var/www/html/privatepictures/, wrote a small Perl script to extract +title and description metadata from the photo files and generate the +RSS file. I ended up using Perl instead of python, as the +libimage-exiftool-perl Debian package seemed to handle the EXIF/XMP +tags I ended up using, while python3-exif did not.

+ +

I am a bit unsure which EXIF/XMP tags to use, as I would like to +use tags that can be easily added/updated using normal free software +photo managing software. I ended up using the tags set using this +exiftool command, as these tags can also be set using digiKam:

+ +
+exiftool -headline='The RSS image title' \
+  -description='The RSS image description.' \
+  -subject+=for-family photo.jpeg
+
+ +

I initially tried the "-title" and "keyword" tags, but they were +invisible in digiKam, so I changed to "-headline" and "-subject". I +use the keyword/subject 'for-family' to flag that the photo should be +shared with my family. Images with this keyword set are located and +copied into my Freedombox for the RSS generating script to find.

+ +

Are there better ways to do this? Get in touch if you have better +suggestions.

+ +

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my +activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address +15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.