Well, it’s been a minute since I wrote here. I wrote some Python code today, to extract some metadata (really, just the creation date) from image and video metadata, using Pillow and FFMPEG respectively.

First off, it was nice to write some code again, to accomplish an everyday small task.

That said, even this simple task had a few bumps. For example, the EXIF creation date doesn’t include time zone info. I did some quick searching and that seems to be the state of things. The creation date appears to be in the time zone of creation (at least for the iPhone camera app, maybe other apps or devices differ?). At least the video metadata has the creation date in UTC.

It’s funny, when you’re writing code like that, objective #1 is just to get the thing working. Cleaning up the code etc can all wait until later.