[maemo-developers] How to access geotag information?

[From: Till Harbaum / Lists]

Hi,

thank for you for your reply.

Am Donnerstag 07 Januar 2010 schrieb Michael Cronenworth:
> > - This consumes much CPU power
> Reading a file is hardly CPU intensive.
Reading thousands of files is. I really don't have much media stored
on my n900, but it's already 400 mp3 files, 150 jpegs and 40 avi videos.
Scanning them for tags aready would take a long time and even worse
would consume lots of CPU (and thus battery) power.

> > - This takes a very, VERY long time
> Not on an SSD unless you have billions of files.
Reading several thousand media files does not take long? You'll have to scan all oif them, even if only a fraction of them actually contains geotags as you don't know which the ones with geotags are before you actually search for them.

> > - This does not work with MP3/WAV/PNG/GIF/AVI/...
> Quite right. Why do you expect GPS information to be available for these 
> files? Who told you to expect GPS data from those file types?
Why should i assume that i can savely ignore them if they all may actually contain geotags? Why should i be sure that e.g. maemo-recorder nor any other app puts geotags into the wav files it stores? 

> > - This information can hardly be shared between different apps
> The standard for JPEG type files is to use EXIF for any and all 
> metadata. Any app should and can support reading EXIF.
But then every single app has to scan every single file. That's awful.

> I think you need to re-think what your goal is.
That's sad as it really limits the usage of geotags. The "right" solution would sure be to let tracker handle this as it's the purpose of tracker to index the disk for media files and to provide meta information to all apps interested in this.

  Till