Firefox EXIF viewers

01Apr08

A few days back, I talked about ExifTool — about how useful it was to quickly see the EXIF information of the photos on your computer.

Well, what about images on the web? There are tons of photos out there. What if you want to see what camera a photo was taken with? What if you want to learn more about the shutter speed and aperture the photo was captured with? As long as the image still has the EXIF data intact, what you need is an equivalent of ExifTool for the web. I’m predominately a Mozilla Firefox user, so I can only talk about the EXIF viewers for Firefox. Internet Explorer or Opera or Safari users will have to find their own solutions, or switch to Firefox.

I know of three such viewers for Firefox:

1. Opanda Iexif
2. Fxif
3. Exif Viewer

I wanted to know which I should keep on my computer, so I tested the three solutions in two ways on Firefox 2.0.0.13:

1. Viewing the EXIF of a photo on my computer through Firefox
2. Viewing the EXIF of a photo on Flickr Photo Download page

Here are two screen shots that shows what each does. The upper left pop up window is for Fxif. The lower left is from Opanda Iexif and the last is from Exif Viewer.

The first is from viewing the EXIF of a photo on my computer through Firefox:

The second is from viewing the EXIF of a photo on Flickr Photo Download page:

Here is how they fared:

Opanda Iexif:
The Firefox addon is actually an extension of the actual Opanda Iexif 2 software. You need to first install the IExif 2 software, and also install the addon to be able to see the Exif information. After installing the software, you get similar capabilities as with ExifTool in that you can right-click on an image and see the metadata. However, ExifTool displays more EXIF info than IExif 2, but is not as pretty. So if you’re in the camp that more is better, for photos on your computer, ExifTool is better. If you don’t need all that info and what something that looks better, go with IExif 2. OK, what about the Firefox addon? It’s not that great. Compared to Exif Viewer, it doesn’t show as many metadata tags for the photo on my PC. Also, it sometimes also doesn’t recognized the metadata in the online photo as in the Flickr image, erroneously reporting that “The image file doesn’t support Exif information”. And in one case, nothing happened after I clicked to see the metadata. Rather annoying.

Fxif:
Fxif is a standalone addon that doesn’t require any additional baggage. Right click on any image, and select Properties, and you get the EXIF data. The problem is that it only shows a limited number of the metadata: Location, Width, Height, Size of File, Camera Make, Camera Model, Image Date, Flash Used, Focal Length, Exposure Time, Aperture, ISO equiv, White Balance, Metering Mode, Exposure and Comment. That’s it. What about color space? What about sharpness and saturation settings? Nope, nope and nope. You may not care for those most of the time but it’s good to know it’s there when you want it. Also, it was unable to extract the metadata from the Flickr photo online.

Exif Viewer:
Then there’s Exif Viewer. It’s also a standalone addon like Fxif. And like the other two, you right-click on the image and you can see the metadata. Except that it works in every case I’ve thrown at it. It doesn’t have the best interface, but all the data is there. You can even control what data you will see when you pop up the window. Nice. It’s also the only one that worked on the Flickr image. Even nicer.

So at the end of it, I’ve uninstalled the first two and am only using Exif Viewer.

What about Firefox 3? While I haven’t tried it myself, from the comments from the author, Alan Raskin, the latest version, 1.40, works with beta 4 just fine.

Just super.

02 Apr 2008 Update: I found another EXIF viewer called ViewEXIF. To install it for Firefox, you first need to install a program for Internet Explorer, then go though several steps to install the Firefox extension. The whole process seemed like a quick throw-together to get something working. But alas it didn’t (work). When I tried to install the extension on my current version of Firefox, 2.0.0.13, Firefox complained that the extension isn’t supported. I should’ve known that this could happen, especially when the website indicated that only Firefox 1.0 was tested…

Filed under: Photography   |  3 Comments
Tags: EXIF, metadata, software