The PHP EXIF Library (PEL) is written in pure PHP and makes it easy to read and write EXIF headers found in JPEG and TIFF images.

Before going to Switzerland I just found time to prepare a new release. Go grab it, and also remember to upgrade to PHP 5, which is now, finally, out as a stable version. Use http://dotdeb.org/ as your source of PHP 5 debs for Debian. -Martin Geisler

Notes

The interface for PelJpeg and PelTiff was changed so that one now can add new content from scratch to JPEG and TIFF images. Bugs in the loading of signed bytes and shorts were fixed, aswell as a bug where timestamps were saved in UTC time, but loaded in local time. The code that turned PelJpeg objects into bytes was fixed, and new test cases were written to test the writing and reading of PelJpeg objects to and from files. New images from Nikon models E950, E5000, and Coolscan IV have been added to the test suite, bringing the total number of tests up to more than 1000.

Changes

• The timestamps were saved as UTC time in PelEntryTime, but loaded as local time in PelEntry. This lead to differences when one tried to load a previously saved timestamp.

• Changed the constructors in PelJpeg, PelExif, PelTiff, and PelIfd so that one can now make new objects without filling them with data immediatly. This makes it possible to add, say, a new APP1 section with EXIF to a JPEG image lacking such information.

• Fixed loading of signed bytes and shorts in PelConvert.

• Renamed the isValidMarker() method into just isValid() in PelJpegMarker, so that it matches the other isValid() methods found in PelJpeg and PelTiff.

• Added test images from Nikon models E950, E5000 and the film scanner Coolscan IV ED, and added tests that would read their contents.

• The shell scripts could only be run from the test directory because of the use of relative paths in the require_once() statements. The scripts can now be run from any directory.

• A stupid bug that prevented PelJpeg objects from being turned into bytes was fixed.

• Fixed the output of PelEntryRationals::getText().

Download PEL

PEL is hosted on SourceForge:

http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.tar.bz2?download (1118 KiB)
http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.tar.gz?download (1273 KiB)
http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.zip?download (1438 KiB)

Stéphanie and I have packed our bags — they are many and heavy! — and are now ready to travel to Switzerland. I’m really looking forward to seeing the country, for I’ve never been close to mountains before. When I’ve shown Stéphanie the “mountains of Mols” she was rolling on the floor, laughing… :-) The highest point in Denmark is way lower than the lowest point in Switzerland.

The trip will take about three weeks for me, then I’ll be back in Denmark — Stéphanie stays in Switzerland for now :-( Don’t expect me to answer many mails in the time to come, both because of the trip and because of my harddisk crash.

I wish everybody a great summer!

Stéphanie and I went to London on the 1st of July for a quick three day trip. We had a really nice time, and we saw a lot of famous places: Westminster Abbey, House of Parlements, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and lots more.

We didn’t spend much time inside the big museums over there, we only visited the National Gallery. Instead we enjoyed the streets of London, looking at the small colored flags in China Town, the huge amount of people in Oxford Street, some sort of dance performence group practicing on the steps on Trafalgar Square and Indian food in a small place in Soho.

We lived in a nice hotel on Leinster Gardens — we spend the last day walking through first Kensington Gardens and then Hyde Park, both of which were nearby. We ended up at Buchingham Palace, just in time to see the Changing of the Guards. We then took the tube back to Livingpool Street Station, and from there back to Harwich there our ferry waited.

All in all we had a great trip, and I took lots of pictures. When I got home I transferred them to my computer, the harddisk was still alive at that time. The next morning the computer was dead!

Now, luckily, Stéphanie had asked for the photos, and we had transferred them all to her computer, so the photos were saved. All my other photos (and other stuff) were saved by the backup I make every six hours to my good friend Svend’s computer. So even though my harddisk is dead, I shouldn’t have lost much.

But still… it will take a couple of days before I figure out what to do, so don’t expect me to answer any emails in that period. And if you’ve sent me mail after the 1st of July, then it has probable been lost :-( Sorry about that. I’ll let you know when my system is back -Martin Geisler

My harddisk (a Seagate Barracuda 7200, 80 GB) crashed yesterday… it just happened from one day to another. I got errors that match those described in the ReiserFS FAQ, indicating that my disk has bad blocks. When I tried to boot my computer from a RedHat 9 disk, then nothing worked — I could initiate the rescue mode, but the computer shut itself down when the rescue kernel tried to boot.

So there is either something really wrong with my harddisk, and this seems to affect the rest of the system too, or perhaps there is something wrong with the motherboard, the RAM, the CPU, or who knows what… I hate it when my system doesn’t play nice!

I have played with the thought of buying a whole new computer from the German Deltatronic. They make completely fan-less computers (fullfilling one of my long dreams: having a totally quiet computer), and by buying a whole computer that they’ve assembled and tested gives me some sort of confidence, that it will remain stable. We’ll see what I decide to do…