ImageMetadata

Resolution studies often produce many generic figures, and one can easily lose track which figure belongs to which simulation setup. One way how to identify figures is to add some text information directly in a figure. This might be a disadvantage, especially, when figures are to be included in some presentations or documents.

Another approach is to hide such information directly into figure files using image EXIF Metadata. The class ImageMetadata implements a simple process that stores/retrieves metadata from the EXIF UserComment tag. The data is stored as a JSON string and contains the following categories:

Image metadata

Metadata	Key	Description
DIR_SETUP	DirSetup	Simulation setup directory
DIR_DATA	DirData	Simulation output data directory
GIT_COMMIT	GitCommit	Git commit of a simulation code
GIT_BRANCH	GitBranch	Git branch of a simulation code
DATETIME	DateTime	Figure creation time
SETTINGS	Settings	Feature settings of a simulation setup

Individual metadata can be easily added to a file,

>>> from scinumtools import ImageMetadata, Metadata
>>> with ImageMetadata('figure.png') as im:
>>>     im.set(Metadata.DATETIME,'2024-04-10 18:00:00')

or retrieved for further use.

>>> with ImageMetadata('figure.png') as im:
>>>     im.get(Metadata.DATETIME)
2024-04-10 18:00:00

All stored metadata can be also printed using print() method.

>>> with ImageMetadata('figure.png') as im:
>>>     im.print()
DateTime: 2024-04-10 18:00:00