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Extracting Video from Motion Photos on Linux

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Photo of a wind turbine.

Modern Android cameras can take "Motion Photos". They capture a few seconds of video from before and after you hit the shutter button. You can then either select the bit of the photo where no-one is blinking, or you can send the whole thing as a little movie. Some apps (like WhatsApp) will play the motion photo when the image is selected, others will just show a static image. So how do you…

Should you embed alt text inside image metadata?

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Screenshot showing technical details of the metadata on a photo. It contains a copyright notice.

Not everyone can see the images you post online. They may have vision problems, they may have a slow connection, or they might be using a text-only browser. How can we let them know what the image shows? The answer is alt text. In HTML we can add a snippet of text to aid accessibility. For example <img src="monalisa.jpg" alt="A painting of the Mona Lisa."> Most social networks will let users…

Reducing GPS accuracy in photos

· 2 comments · 150 words · Viewed ~209 times


Unix is user-friendly — it's just choosy about who its friends are.

Here's a quick one-liner to reduce the precision of location stored in a photo's EXIF metadata: exiftool -c "%.2f" -TagsFromFile @ -GPSLatitude -GPSLongitude photo.jpg (Thanks to the EXIFtool Forum for their help.) Why is this useful? Modern phones automatically attach a GPS location to every photo you take. GPS resolution is around 10 metres. When you share your photos, you're often sharing …