Ryuuji Yoshimoto's EXIF Reader 2.20 review

I just love nifty little utilities that are made to do a specific job and do it really well. Ryuuji Yoshimoto's shareware EXIF Reader definitely falls into that category. At the time of this writing, it's the first EXIF viewing software that I have personally seen that decodes so much E-10 specific information.

Delivered in a .zip file of just over 400K and containing only two files, the installed program (if you can call it installed) takes less than a meg of hard drive space. The actual installation process is really just extracting the .exe file and a text file into any directory you choose. There is no InstallShield, no Registry settings, no uninstaller. Just unzip it and run it.

The opening view isn't very exciting, but it has the basics required to be a Windows program. It uses familiar pull down menus, has a few buttons and allows short cut key strokes.

The drop down File menu has just the essentials: Open, Exit, Before and Next commands. These last two are great if you're in a directory of images files. Just hot key your way or backward or forward across the directory and the selected image will be displayed as a thumbnail along with the EXIF information.

The file open command is all Windows and of course supports long file names and mapped drives on servers.

The EXIF Reader window can be resized so you can stretch it out to see as many lines as you want.

The amount of decoded E-10 image information is impressive. Take a look at these screen shots to get an idea.

Of course there is a lot of data space in the EXIF header that the E-10 either does not use, is used for purposes known only to Olympus too.

Another feature I like is the ability to copy all or part of the EXIF information to the clip board. As you can see, you can copy all item names and values separately - as you might do to past them into a column on a spreadsheet. You can also copy everything or just selected items by highlighting them.

Here is an example of some data that was exported using the clipboard. As you can see, I just highlighted just nine lines, did a Copy Selected, and pasted into Wordpad.

Even though the primary function of this utility is to read the header, it also has the ability to display the image.

The zoom and pan functions are not real fast, but they function reliably.

Ryuuji Yoshimoto has done a great job making a useful tool in a small package. You can pick up a copy of his EXIF Reader from his web site:
http://www.takenet.or.jp/~ryuuji/minisoft/exifread/english/