How to sort gallery images by EXIF data?

How does everyone else sort their galleries?

Would I have to do a custom query for something like that? Would this be a reasonable FR…a custom sort order?

Am I the first person to want this?

Hi, Erin;

The problem is that EE’s gallery doesn’t read EXIF data by default, so there is no orderby option for this. If you’re showing EXIF data it’s probably via Low’s plugin, or another solution I haven’t seen yet. =)

It may be possible to add the orderby= using an extension, otherwise yes, a query might be best, and you’d need to use the query in combination with Low’s plugin. But it will definitely require custom code.

There are requests, already, for EE to be able to handle EXIF data, so you might find one and add your support.

I suppose another option would be to write an extension that hooked into the image upload facility and modified the date based on the EXIF info. Then you could use EE’s standard gallery sort mechanism.

If I understand things properly, I would use this extension hook to get the exif data and set the date?

For those following along, I am going to attempt to tie into the gallery insert entry hook and add the exif data to a new table so that the data can be retrieved later via a plugin (that I will write as well).

Does ‘gallery_cp_insert_entry_end’ get called from the Batch Entry?

Mods, please move this to the Extensions forum…more appropriate there me thinks.

Answering my own question. Yes, it does get called from the batch entries.

Following up:

I finally found some EXIF code that didn’t error out on my Canon-produced images. I wrote an extension that reads the EXIF data and changes the entry’s entry_date to set it to the EXIF original date. This allows me to sort on entry_date and have it be the proper sort.