EXIF Image Rating

Image ratings are essential to my work flow and management of my Smug Mug photo galleries.  Using that data in a consistent way is important to me.

EXIF is short for EXchangeable Image file Format and can be used for storing quite a bit of text information with or inside of a data file. EXIF typically stores image capture time, identification of camera and lens and many other optional fields.  This posting delves into my use of the Rating field.  Which is really nothing more than a very short integer limited to values of 0 to 5.  Those values are often represented as a count of stars (⭐️) to show a rating.

Yellowstone White Balance and Exposure

A lot of the images captured on our recent trip to Yellowstone have a nasty blue tinge.  Many of those that don't have the nasty blue tinge have really grey snow.  Both of those issues are artifacts of digital cameras, typically running in auto mode trying to take great pictures under lighting conditions that are anything but great.

Through most of our trip we had heavy cloud cover which fools many cameras into shooting at much too low of a color temperature (the variable controlled by white balance).  This results in a very blue image.  Here is an example (not a great shot, but a good example).

Image as shot: Yuck!