Extracting EXIF data with Rust

Disclaimer: This is probably an overkill for such task, but I’m currently learning Rust and wanted to write a small program to do the job.

I was coding my photo gallery this weekend and I had to extract EXIF data somehow programatically and include them in the individual photo pages. As in the other parts of my website, I also wanted to use the Astro Content Collections, so there is a route for every photo with detailed information as the EXIF and possibly some comments and other stuff.

Problem Description: Creating a bunch of MDX files with the same names as the images/photographs and put the EXIF, metadata and content inside them automatically in a directory.

So, I have a lot of photos and I need an .mdx file for every one of them in a directory. The photos are already processed -resized and converted to .webp- and being hosted on my server. Therefore I am not processing them using the Astro’s image processing features. I could do it and push everything in my Astro deploy process, but I am hosting my photos on my own server and this website is still on the Netlify’s free plan. Soon I will migrate it to my server too when I have time.

Anyway, below is the code where I use the rexiv2 crate to generate the necessary files with the required EXIF data inside them in a formatted manner.

exif-to-md.rs

use chrono::NaiveDateTime; //for formatting time and date
use rexiv2::Metadata;
use std::fs::{self, File};
use std::io::Write;

fn main() -> std::io::Result<()> {
    let folder_path = "./photos";
    // using MDX in Astro, so the files should be .mdx
    let markdown_extension = ".mdx";

    // initialize Rexiv2 crate
    let _ = rexiv2::initialize();

    // read the photos directory
    for entry in fs::read_dir(folder_path)? {
        let entry = entry?;
        let path = entry.path();

        // check if the entry is a file
        if path.is_file() {
            if let Some(file_stem) = path.file_stem() {
                let file_stem = file_stem.to_string_lossy().trim().to_lowercase();

                let markdown_file_path =
                    format!("{}/{}{}", folder_path, file_stem, markdown_extension);

                // extract EXIF data if non-existent -> default is an empty string
                let mut date_taken = "".to_string();
                let mut camera_model = "".to_string();
                let mut camera_make = "".to_string();

                // content of the files to match my Astro component structure
                let md_content = r#"
import {Picture} from 'astro:assets';

<picture>
<source srcset={`https://img.kenan.fyi/photos/originals/${frontmatter.title}_1920px.webp`} type="image/webp"/>
<img src={`https://img.kenan.fyi/photos/originals/${frontmatter.title}_1920px.jpg`} alt="" width="2880" height="1200" loading="lazy" decoding="async"/>
</picture>
"#;

                // load the metadata using rexiv2
                if let Ok(metadata) = Metadata::new_from_path(&path) {
                    // get the date
                    if let Ok(value) = metadata.get_tag_string("Exif.Image.DateTime") {
                        // parse the date from YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS to YYYY-MM-DD
                        if let Ok(parsed_date) = NaiveDateTime::parse_from_str(&value, "%Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S")
                        {
                            date_taken = parsed_date.format("%Y-%m-%d").to_string();
                        }
                    }

                    // get the camera
                    if let Ok(value) = metadata.get_tag_string("Exif.Image.Make") {
                        camera_make = value;
                    }

                    // get the camera model
                    if let Ok(value) = metadata.get_tag_string("Exif.Image.Model") {
                        camera_model = value;
                    }
                }

                // create the markdown file and write to it
                let mut file = File::create(&markdown_file_path)?;
                writeln!(file, "---")?;
                writeln!(file, "draft: false")?;
                writeln!(file, "title: \"{}\"", file_stem)?; // Title
                writeln!(file, "shotDate: {}", date_taken)?; // EXIF date taken
                writeln!(file, "camera: \"{} {}\"", camera_make, camera_model)?; // EXIF camera model
                writeln!(file, "---\n")?;
                writeln!(file, "{}", md_content)?;

                println!("Created: {}", markdown_file_path);
            }
        }
    }
    Ok(())
}

So, what it does basically is the following:

Check the folder for files
Assign empty strings to the exif data variables if the photo does not have any
Extract the metadata
Create the file
Write the metadata to the file with writeln! macro
Write the boilerplate content for the .mdx file afterwards

It is a one-time solution for a specific problem, but as I said, it is a small practice in Rust and an easy way to create multiple files I needed with specific data in them. I would probably implement a better program (maybe a CLI tool?) to streamline the whole process, because this just solves the .mdx creation problem of a photo. The resizing, processing and upload of them are another sections of the whole process, which I have not mentioned.

Maybe I will post about them later too. Cheers.