My gallery is powered by an application called, oddly enough, Gallery 1.5. One of the nifty features of Gallery is that it can read the metadata from JPEG images – clicking on Photo Properties causes a window to display, and if EXIF data is present, it gets displayed in a nice table format. One of the downsides to this feature is it only works if you have JPEG images – the code that Gallery uses to determine whether or not the image supports EXIF looks like:

if(eregi('jpe?g$', $file)) {
    return true;
} else {
    return false;
}

Brilliant.

A quick trip with Google got me to the home of ExifTool – a Perl application that can dig EXIF/IPTC/XMP data out of pretty much any image format, and write it back if you so desire. So, onwards and upwards, time to make Gallery understand what exiftool is!