The EXIF Extractor is a Java application designed to extract EXIF metadata from images stored in Mayan-EDMS and convert them into Mayan-EDMS metadata fields. The application requires Java 1.8 or later. The application may be run via the command
java -jar exif-1.1.0.jar optional-command-parameters
To see the switches that may appear in the optional command parameters, use the command:
java -jar exif-1.1.0.jar -h
If you specify no parameters on the command line, the application prompts you for all the information it needs. The required data include:
- Mayan userid and password. Note that the specified userid must have permissions to create metadata types and to associated metadata values with documents in addition to read-only permissions like list all tags and download documents.
- The base URL used to connect to Mayan-EDMS. This might be something like http://some.domain.name:29880
- The Mayan-EDMS tag that marks documents to be processed. I use tag label "Unprocessed", but you can specify any tag to the app. The application processes only documents carrying the indicated tag and removes the tag when it finishes with the document. In addition to carrying the expected tag, the document must have an "image/*" mime type, as reported by Mayan-EDMS.
- A flag, either true or false (lower case, spelled out) that indicates whether the application should insert new Mayan metadata types as part of its operation. Note that all the Mayan metadata types must exist in the targt Mayan database; if any are missing, the application throws an exception. Also note that you have no control over the mapping between the EXIF metadata names and the Mayan metadata labels; the mapping is hard-coded into the application.
- A flag, either true or false (lower case, spelled out) that indicates whether the application should ignore EXIF fields for which it has no mapping. The application knows about 50 or more standard EXIF field names, but it hasn't been tested with a wide variety of cameras; there are probably EXIF fields out there that the application isn't expecting. By default the application throws an exception when it encounters an unexpected EXIF field, but setting this flag 'true' causes the app to ignore quietly any unexpected field.
Note that the application requires that all Mayan metadata types are defined in the Mayan database. However, since these are normal Mayan metadata types, you can configure your document types to allow only a subset of all the EXIF metadata types. The application does not attempt to add a metadata field to a document that doesn't allow that field. The application also does not add a metadata field to a document which already has a value for that field.