Picture Property (VB / VBA 2003)

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How can I use VBA to retrieve the picture property “Date Picture Taken”

I am able to use the FileSystemObject library to retrieve the the following properties:

“Date Created”
“Date LastModified”
“Date LastAccessed”

Thanks

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I don’t know if FSO has (direct) access to this property. It’s part of the EXIF data embedded in the JPEG header information. You could try to programatically parse through the header, but it’s probably easier to use a free command line tool like ExifTool by Phil Harvey. Get the version that DOES NOT require Perl to be installed. There’s a bit of a learning curve on the subject of EXIF tags, pretty well covered on this site, but worth pursuing if you’re going to be working with digital photos.

Alan

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No, FSO only has access to the “standard” file properties such as last modified date, not to the JPG-specific EXIF data.

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I’m sure windows has a com object to be referenced in VBA and retrieve this information. I just can’t find it yet.

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… I kinda doubt this myself. But I could be wrong of course. I’d be interested if you uncover any info.

Alan

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Here is a function you can use to retrieve extended properties of a file:

Function GetProperty(strFile, n)
Dim objShell
Dim objFolder
Dim objFolderItem
Dim i
Dim strPath
Dim strName
Dim intPos

On Error GoTo ErrHandler

intPos = InStrRev(strFile, “”)
strPath = Left(strFile, intPos)
strName = Mid(strFile, intPos + 1)
Set objShell = CreateObject(“Shell.Application”)
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(strPath)
Set objFolderItem = objFolder.ParseName(strName)
If Not objFolderItem Is Nothing Then
GetProperty = objFolder.GetDetailsOf(objFolderItem, n)
End If

ExitHandler:
Set objFolderItem = Nothing
Set objFolder = Nothing
Set objShell = Nothing
Exit Function

ErrHandler:
MsgBox Err.Description, vbExclamation
Resume ExitHandler
End Function

The date a picture was taken happens to be property #25, so you can use

Debug.Print GetProperty(“C:PicturesMyHouse.jpg”, 25)

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And here is a list of the values for n you can use in the function from my previous reply. Obviously, not all properties will be filled for all files (16-22 are for MP3 files, 24-26 for JPG files). Properties 27-29 may be used for custom purposes.

0	Name
1	Size
2	Type
3	Date Modified
4	Date Created
5	Date Accessed
6	Attributes
7	Status
8	Owner
9	Author
10	Title
11	Subject
12	Category
13	Pages
14	Comments
15	Copyright
16	Artist
17	Album Title
18	Year
19	Track Number
20	Genre
21	Duration
22	Bit Rate
23	Protected
24	Camera Model
25	Date Picture Taken
26	Dimensions
27	(Not used)
28	(Not used)
29	(Not used)
30	Company
31	Description
32	File Version
33	Product Name
34	Product Version

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Thanks Hans. The function works great!

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In addition to Hans’s neat code, I remembered I had a class/dll for VB6 that allows you to pass a file name and return an object which contains all Exif tags in a JPEG file. Below is an example using this class in VB6:

	Dim objExif as New ExifReader
	Dim txtExifInfo as String
	
	objExif.Load "C:Path_To_Jpg.jpg"
	txtExifInfo = objExif.Tag(DateTimeOriginal)
	MsgBox txtExifInfo

Alan

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