[Shotwell] Unique ID EXIF Tags for photos

[Roman Yepishev]

Hello,

This may not be the proper place for such kind of discussion, but since
I started to use Shotwell to organize my photo collection it may be
useful.

I have been collecting photos since 2005 and so far I have 13K of photos
on the hard drive and nearly the same amount on the removable storage
devices.

A lot of the photos are duplicates, some have dates adjusted (so that
their checksum does not match anymore), some were renamed during gphoto2
PTP import (IMG_1234.jpeg instead of IMG_1234.JPG), some were renamed
"comform" to MMDD_HHmmss name (silly idea, really).

It is rather impossible to remove duplicates with checksum-checking
software and CPU-intensive algorighms are required to match photos as
images (brain can be used as well).

EXIF standard[1] has a special field ImageUniqueID which (unfortunately)
does not get filled by my point-and-shot cameras (Kodak & Nicon). And
here is the discussion point:

How about for the software that downloads the data from the camera to
create UUID for the imported files in case it is missing?

I usually download the photos to my PC and then distribute via various
means so having some extra info to match files in case I end up having 2
copies of them somehow is a big plus. Photo management software might
also store these identifiers to make sure that no duplicates are
imported (and fallback to checksum check if no UUID is present).

Of course, this will not help me to get current photo collection in
order (a lot of manual work is required) but it might help someone in
the future, when I finally get all sorted I will surely assign these
UUIDs and destroy all other copies :)

[1] www.exif.org/Exif2-2.PDF

-- 
Roman Yepishev <roman.yepishev at gmail.com>
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