I'm storing the “other” metadata (metadata not automatically captured by Rails/ActiveRecord/ActiveStorage) in the new “other_metadata” company_file field.
I think I’ll keep the raw extraction value for each “metadata of interest” field that we collect, each stored as a key/value pair in the “other_metadata” object.
Additionally, I’ll create a new field with “Formatted” appended to the end of the field name for any field that we want to always try to have consistent data type & format for (e.g. latitude/longitude fields)
Example: latitude/longitude
HEIC, HEIF files
the lat/long values are in the keys GPSLatitude/GPSLongitude and in the “DMS” format (as shown in attached screenshots), but this format isn’t super usable (nor the same data type or format as our project lat/lon data), so I have a method to convert it to decimal degrees and store it in the GPSLatitudeFormatted/GPSLongitudeFormatted fields
…other file types
Maybe other file types also have latitude and longitude fields (maybe they are also called GPSLatitude/GPSLongitude, or maybe something else), possibly as different data types or formats as well…. we can always still depend on the GPSLatitudeFormatted/GPSLongitudeFormatted fields being present in the correct “decimal degrees” format (because we will handle the conversions of whatever latitude/longitude types we come across, adding new methods to the controller to convert them to decimal degrees format)
(Note: it seems that GPSLatitude/GPSLongitude seem to be consistent among file types so far, if they have latitude/longitude data present, but I think it’s a safe idea to keep the same sort of system — never modifying the actual metadata values (storing them as is) + creating a “xFormatted” field as needed for data type consistency/dependability)
requires to be locally installed
This gems results are possibly just “EXIF” category metadata, but it might be multiple categories of metadata put together, as
to see all available metadata fields for a file ran through mini_exiftool, place the following code in company_files_controller:
# company_files_controller
# within :create action (within "if file_params[:attachments] ... end" block)
# read and log metadata (use this when wanting to see available metadata fields on an attachment)
file_params[:attachments].each do |attachment|
read_and_log_metadata(attachment)
end
# private method
def read_and_log_metadata(attachment)
begin
file = attachment.tempfile
puts "Reading file: #{file.path}"
puts "Using Exiftool command: #{MiniExiftool.command}"
if File.readable?(file.path)
metadata = MiniExiftool.new(file.path)
metadata.to_hash.each do |key, value|
puts "#{key}: #{value}"
end
puts "Metadata errors: #{metadata.errors.join(', ')}" unless metadata.errors.empty?
else
puts "File not readable: #{file.path}"
end
rescue => e
Rails.logger.error "Error reading metadata for file #{attachment.original_filename}: #{e}"
end
end
