Is there a way to script InDesign to read the EXIF information of a photo?

Question

I'm thinking of making a photo portfolio in InDesign and I have the following functionality in mind:

First I would make a document of several pages containing placeholder images. Each page has a fullpage photograph with a small black rectangle on the side, overlapping the photo a bit. This rectangle should contain three text-boxes with the following information:

• Title
• Location
• Year

This data is already present in the photographs EXIF info. Is there a way to automatically read these entries from the photograph that will replace each placeholder on the page and place them in the three text-boxes in the black rectangle?

I haven't tried anything yet as I have no idea where to start. I have used InDesign before, so the basics are more or less clear to me. I have InDesign 5.5 at my disposal on Mountain Lion 10.8.2

Answer 1

Adobe has scripting resource available at ( https://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/indepth.displayTab2.html#Scriptingresources )

I have copies of those docs, but I do not see an explicit object reference. I do however have a an object browser as part of a [random] software product, and I see that there is an class called LinkMetadata with members DocumentTitle, CreationDate, (ModificationDate) [...]

One of the intro docs on the page listed above discusses where to find the object reference/dictionary files.

If it were me, I would probably just gather the images in a singular location, or compile a text file of the arbitrary filesystem locations of the images, run OS-level batch job on them with an exif utility, piping the output to a text file.

I'd massage that result into a text delimited merge format and use InDesign's data merge functionality to create the images and captions.

Answer 2

Wouldn't live captions a perfect tool and script free ?