On Tuesday Google announced beta versions of its chrome browser for Mac and Linux operating systems and at the same time released over 300 Chrome extensions for Windows and Linux, unfortunately Mac users are going to have to wait a bit longer for extensions as they aren’t quite ready for the Mac version of chrome yet.
First thing I went looking for after updating my Chrome browser to the latest version was to see if an Exif viewer was included in the released extensions and I was very pleased to see that there was one.
Exif (Exchangeable image file format) data is stored in image files (unless the owner decides to remove it or its removed as part of their processing work flow) and can tell you a lot of information about a photograph including when it was taken, who owns it, what camera+lens combination it was taken with, specific camera settings that were used any many other details, the list of what can be recorded in Exif data is very long and also now includes info such as Geo Tags so that on certain cameras you can determine the actual location where an image was taken. Phones like the Apple iPhone, Google Android and N series Nokia mobiles are all capable of adding geo-location information to photographs taken with their on board camera.
Photographers like myself spend time looking at other photographers work, its one of the ways that we grow and come up with new ideas and concepts for our own shoots and being able to see the equipment and settings that another photographer has used for a particular shot can be another interesting aspect when looking at photos so an Chrome extension that lets us do this easily is a welcome addition.
Exponator is a Chrome extension that displays the Exif information over images that have it when viewed through your Chrome web browser. There’s no need to right click and select a menu option like in the popular Exif viewer for Firefox, you just hover your mouse over a photo on a web page.
Ive tested this on my wedding photography blog images and a few others and found it worked great on my blog but not so great on some other websites and forums that I tried it on so its definitely no perfect yet but I really like the way it displays the Exif data over the images without any clicking so its definitely worth some more testing I reckon.
The extension is very customizable and you can decide to display a bare minimum of Exif information for each photo or a whole lot of info. and setting what to show is very easy you just copy the options from the displayed list in the order that you want them displayed into the configuration box in the extensions settings.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like with one of my wedding photos from the blog. This is with the default settings so you can select to view a lot more information than this but it has the main things visible that I would want to see when looking at photos on the web such as camera and settings.
Exponator Exif viewer for Chrome Beta
Here’s the link to the google blog post if you want more information about the latest beta of Chrome and the extensions now available for it. Official Google Blog, Chrome Beta
by Nick
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