recocam provides robust tools for extracting and processing information and annotations that have been stored in image EXIF data. This package was built to support ecologists who have to deal with large numbers of images from camera traps and to prepare them for analysis with the camtrapr package, but it can work with all sorts of images as long as they contain annotation that have been stored in the keywords EXIF attribute field. This package was developed by the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney.
This package is designed to be computationally efficient and can process multiple subfolders full of images, but be aware that processing time goes up as more images are included. Current processing speed for the main importing function gather_images() is around 100 images a second.
This package allows users to generate a data frame of information contained in image EXIF data, and can adapt to different tagging schemes as long as they follow a structure (see below). The other functions in the package are designed to enable users to use their image data with camtrapr's data exploration tools.
Before you can install and use recocam, you must install one program (ExifTool, a free and open source program for extracting image metadata) and a few R packages (notably exifr to enable efficient use of ExifTool, with reshape2 and Tidyverse providing some important functions).
The method for installing ExifTool on your computer varies depending on if you are using MacOS/Linux/Unix or Windows. You can find out more about ExifTool and download the software here.
On MacOS/Linux/Unix, simply follow the steps provided on ExifTool's website. For Windows, you will have take a couple extra steps to ensure that R is able to utilize ExifTool. Once you have downloaded the stand-alone executable, unzip the file and rename the .exe file to "exiftool.exe". Then place this file in your primary windows directory (C:/Windows in most cases). Once you have done this, R should be able to find ExifTool.
To make sure that you have correctly installed ExifTool:
#Check if your system is able to find ExifTool
Sys.which("exiftool")
#This is what you would see on MacOS. On Windows, you should see "C:\\WINDOWS\\exiftool.exe"
To install recocam, you can download it from the Sydney Informatics Hub's github.
library(devtools)
install_github("https://github.com/Sydney-Informatics-Hub/recocam")
If you have any questions about this package, run into any issues, or simply want to see what is going on with development of recocam, check out the repository's issues page.
If you use recocam for a publication, presentation, or any form professional application, please cite recocam as well as the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney.