Camera

Camera
	Chapter 6. Apps

If accidentally deleted a photo the Gallery App might have an album where recently deleted photos appear and can be restored.

Also File Manager Apps might have a similar feature.

Google fotos

The concept behind Google fotos is that the Photos are stored on Google Servers that might have free 15GByte more memory space available. It supports also multiple Smart Phones and allows also Desktop PC's to access the photos. It is full of other features. Obvious Google likes to earn money to expand the free memory space.

Deleting photos on the device as in the gallery app does not delete the photo in Google fotos.

So taking lot of fotos during the day and delete the ugly ones will not delete them on Google fotos

Important

Google fotos wants to be the master place for the photos.

Photos are in the DCIM/ directory.

To see how much is used go to Manage Google Account => Payments and Abo => Manage Memory

It is easier to find how to pay more money then to find out how the memory is used.

To not pay for an abo, move older photos into a folder that is excluded from the backup (not in the DCIM/ directory) ,

Backup the folder as on a DesktopPC (using M-discs is a recommended way).
On the smart Phone, Zip the folder so no fotos on the device get accidentally deleted from Google programs. Now delete them using Google fotos. After that unzip the folder on the device

Once excluded, the photos should show a no cloud symbol:

Motion Photos

Motion Photos are photos with a small video sequence.

Important

Don't use Motion Photos when high quality photos are required.

Motion Photos might be device specific implemented. There is a high quality picture and a more compressed video sequence. Pictures can be exported from the video sequence but have a much lower quality than expected (video quality versus picture quality).

The video can usually be exported from the motion pictures.

More tricky is to get just the high quality picture out of the motion picture. The video sequence might be device specific embedded in the EXIF (EXchangable Image Format).

exiftool -G1 -a -u -n <name>.jpg might show unknown markers and segments where the video is inside

Ways to remove the video are:

Open the picture in Gimp and store it without the EXIF data.
exiftool -all= -overwrite_original <picture>.jpg removes all EXIF

Create a file with known EXIF data and remove all EXIF data from the jpg, then re-add the known EXIF data back to the jpg. Those 3 steps can be done using the following jpg_exif_cleaner.sh script:

#!/bin/bash

# Show help message
show_help() {
    echo "Usage: $0 /path/to/jpgs"
    echo
    echo "Cleans EXIF data in jpg files."
    echo "Creates cleaned JPGs in the same directory, prefixed with 'clean_'."
    echo
    echo "Options:"
    echo "  -h, --help    Show this help message and exit"
}

# Check for help option
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    show_help
    exit 0
fi

# Check if a directory was given
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Error: No directory provided."
    show_help
    exit 1
fi

# Change to target directory
cd "$1" || { echo "Directory not found: $1"; exit 1; }

# Process JPG files
for file in *.jpg; do
    [ -f "$file" ] || continue  # skip if no matching files
    base="${file%.jpg}"
    clean_file="${base}_clean.jpg"
    echo "$clean_file"

    # Step 1: Save original EXIF
    exiftool -exif:all -tagsFromFile "$file" -o "${base}.exif"

    # Step 2: Strip metadata and write cleaned file
    exiftool -all= -o "$clean_file" "$file"

    # Step 3: Restore EXIF to cleaned file
    exiftool -tagsFromFile "${base}.exif" -exif:all -overwrite_original "$clean_file"

    # Clean up
    rm "${base}.exif"

done

Observe the different file sizes.


WhatsApp		Chapter 7. USB