mt photo plugin

Somewhere in the middle of building a blog to display my photos, I had a realization that packed into each of the JPEG's is a bunch of very interesting information about the shot. I know this because Tyler knows this, and because I see that the photo browser supplied by Canon knows this. With a bit of tweaking, kicking, and creative debugging I threw together a Movable Type plugin to read the goodies straight from the file. So, basically, my photo blog needs only the filename for the image and the rest is generated by the plugin (including widths & heights). Now if I couple that with the script that rescales all the images, generates a thumbnail, and outputs an MT import file; I have a fairly automated system that includes everything from the images themselves to the aperture setting and exposure time used in the shot. Getting the EXIF data from the jpeg was a piece of cake; there are perl modules to do that. Decoding Canon's MakerNote was an entirely different affair. Luckily, the hard work was already done. I will post more details later on, including the scripts. Though, the MakerNote decoding is extremely custom in that I had to assume some byte offsets. All and all though, the MT plugin architecture is quite nice even if it's a nightmare to debug.