One of the problems with film photography is that when you scan the film negatives you get an image file that doesn’t contain the metadata (called exif data) giving details of when the photograph was taken, the camera used and whatnot. I’ve found a lovely tool called ExifTool which I can use to set the required values in a image file. But what I really wanted was a little program with a Graphical User Interface that lets me select a folder full of images and then set all the images to the specified camera make and model.
I had a quick chat with ChatGPT and it wrote two programs for me. One in Python and the other in PowerShell. I fired up the Python one and it just worked. It made the menu you can see above, using the TkInter interface. The formatting of the window could use a little work, but the program itself seems to do exactly what I want. All I had to do was describe what I wanted and out popped the code. This is both highly impressive and deeply scary.
I’ve now decided that I don’t want to have to enter the make and model of the camera each time, I want the application to use the folder hierarchy to work out what the name should be (i.e. for the above image I would have a parent folder called Mamiya which contains a subfolder called Mamiya Press 23 Standard in which the image files are stored). I’m going to tell ChatGPT about my idea and then get it to create that instead. When I’ve got it all working I’ll put it on GitHub for anyone who has the same problem as me.
