PixStics - Discussion

[brianleighty]

Hello everyone, so I've been working on a script for around the past 10 months and I'm finally ready to get some feedback from other people. I named it Pixstics because it does picture statistics by taking the exif data in JPGs and compares it against the other JPGs in the set. It's all javascript based so there's no software to install and it will work offline as well once it's been loaded up at least once. If some of you guys want to check it out and see what you think:
http://leightyphotography.com/PixStics/
I'd love to hear your feedback on it. Thanks.

[brianleighty]

Forgot to mention, even though it mentions it in the link, this requires either Firefox or Chrome. IE and Safari both don't have the FileReader method needed to make it work.

Just to give you a few examples of what you can do, let's say you want to know what focal length or lens you use the most. Then you want to break that down and find out in each of those groups how many pictures you rated as 5 stars. Or perhaps what shutter speed you use at what focal length or what aperture you use the most. The possibilities are pretty broad since there are 11 properties I believe and so if I'm doing my math right it should be a total of 121 (11 x 11).

As I say on the site, none of your data gets uploaded to the server and if you want to test this load up the page. After it's fully loaded disable your wifi or lan connection and then refresh the page. Everything should still work. The only thing that ever sends an data is if you want to export the graph as this uses Highcharts server for creating the output file. Anyways take a look and see what you think.

[PeterJ]

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

[nightbreath]

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

This might happen when you process big amount of data in a row due to timeouts in browsers. Brian, if there's an issue you'd be stuck with you can contact me so I can look at the script with you.

[bvukich]

Very cool, even works in chrome on Linux 

Doesn't go down through a directory tree though, which is inconvenient.

[adhocphotographer]

Looks awesome...

Tried it on 65 jpegs (large as i have edited them), and got stuck at "processing 65 of 65" for about 10 mins now. I guess it is due to the large number of photos? Does the file size make a difference (apart from maybe eating up some ram)?

Good work, i really like it...  hopefully i can check out my results soon/

[rpt]

Fabulous! I have always wanted something like this. I was going to write a program to do this and now do not need to!
I did 237 files (JPGs from my 5D3) using Chrome on XP-SP3 and it worked great. Compared Shutter speed vs Focal Length. ISO vs Shutter speed etc. I have passed the link on to some enthusiasts at my work place.

Thank you!

[candyman]

Excellent!
I just used it on 59 JPG's (using Chrome on Win7)
It was fast when changing the parameters (I switched form apeture to ISO to Shutterspeed to Focal Length) and rebuilding the graph almost instantly.
I will check it with larger files as well and als with higher quantity.


Thanks for offering this great tool!

[brianleighty]

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

This might happen when you process big amount of data in a row due to timeouts in browsers. Brian, if there's an issue you'd be stuck with you can contact me so I can look at the script with you.

Thanks nightbreath. I don't think that's the issue. I've done test up to 5000 pictures that took almost a minute to process. If you'd like to help out with issues (especially ones that you can recreate and figure out what's going on that'd be cool.

[brianleighty]

Very cool, even works in chrome on Linux 

Doesn't go down through a directory tree though, which is inconvenient.

Unfortunately that's a limitation of FileReader You can add additional files on after the initial set though so that's one option. The other is to go into the folder you wish to have all the subfolders selected and just do a search for jpg files and then drag all the files over.

[brianleighty]

Cool idea and nice user interface. I seem to have a problem though when I drop more than about half a dozen photos, it gets stuck at 'Processing 7 of 8' for example. It seems like it's actually loaded them if I go ahead and select some charts, it just doesn't report them as loaded. The JPEG files I was trying are about 5MB each and I'm using FF 13.0.1.

Peter, do you have firebug installed? If you do, would you mind pulling up the console and letting me know if you see an error there? My guess is there's so bit of code that's failing AFTER the files get read in. It shouldn't have anything to do with the size of the files. I wrote it so that it only reads the first 32KB of each file since the EXIF data should easily be contained within that space. Also, do you have Chrome installed? If so, could you try running it in there as well? I did most of the development in Chrome but I did do limited testing in Firefox and everything seemed to work there. Also, if you could let me know what properties and detail levels and chart type you have it set at that would help too. Thanks.

[brianleighty]

Looks awesome...

Tried it on 65 jpegs (large as i have edited them), and got stuck at "processing 65 of 65" for about 10 mins now. I guess it is due to the large number of photos? Does the file size make a difference (apart from maybe eating up some ram)?

Good work, i really like it...  hopefully i can check out my results soon/

adhoc, if you could read my response to Peter and follow the same thing, if it's on 65 of 65 then it's already switched over to building the graphs which is probably where the issue is. If you could pull up the the error console. If you're in Chrome, right click on any element on the page and click inspect element. Down in the lower left you should see something similar to >= except with 3 lines instead of 2. If you click on that then I'm guessing you'll see an error. If you could let me know what that is and the information I requested from Peter as well I'll try to fix it. Regarding sizing, I've run sets of 5000 pictures in the 3 - 5 MB range and haven't had issues with it so definitely not a size issue.

[brianleighty]

Fabulous! I have always wanted something like this. I was going to write a program to do this and now do not need to!
I did 237 files (JPGs from my 5D3) using Chrome on XP-SP3 and it worked great. Compared Shutter speed vs Focal Length. ISO vs Shutter speed etc. I have passed the link on to some enthusiasts at my work place.

Thank you!

Thanks rpt. I'm glad to hear it's working right for somebody Yeah, I've had the idea for a while too. I didn't realize it until after I started working on this but there are actually a few other options available. They're pretty limited in what they can do though and they were all PC only if I remember correctly. Feel free to share this with as many as you like. I think it would be a great tool for photographers buying decisions.

[brianleighty]

Excellent!
I just used it on 59 JPG's (using Chrome on Win7)
It was fast when changing the parameters (I switched form apeture to ISO to Shutterspeed to Focal Length) and rebuilding the graph almost instantly.
I will check it with larger files as well and als with higher quantity.


Thanks for offering this great tool!

Thanks candyman, I'm glad with how it turned out. I was worried when I started it might run real slow. The only one that seems to take quite a while sometimes is focal length if you set the detail to 4 and you have a really large set of images. Still not terribly long and it's cool seeing all that data.

[picturesbyme]

Looks good, I used something similar (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/ExposurePlot.html) before but will give this a try. The planned add-ons look promising too. Thanks.