Recording Film Camera Data in EXIF

EXIF is the standard used to record metadata about digital images, usually time-of-capture data such as aperture and f/stop. In the process of digitizing old negatives and slides, one can easily capture information about the colorspace, light source, and other attributes of the scanner — an Epson V700 in my case. This has a certain archival value when used in color-critical workflows. Family photographs, however, don’t usually fall into this category. What if instead of taking capturing information about the intermediary imaging device — the film scanner — we recorded instead the attributes of the originary device? It turns out this is pretty trivial to do with command-line EXIF manipulation tools such as exiftool.

In the above example, we’re inserting attributes of the original imaging device (a Kodak Instamatic X-15F last sold in 1988) into our scanned TIFF files. The X-15F had a fixed aperture of f/11, and a set exposure of 1/90th of a second. The non-removable lens was 43mm, close to the ‘normal’ range of 50mm.

This lets us sort and manage these scans in the same way as every other digital image in our library:

This particular Instamatic camera has been in my family a long time — the earliest time I can find it documented is about 1981:

It went with us to Hawaii in the middle of the 1980s, and was taken to the top of Squaw Valley not long after. I don’t know the date of the last set of photos that it took, but with accurate EXIF-based metadata about these negatives, it’s an easy step to create a virtual album of them all.