SharePoint Online Image metadata extraction stopped working?

Brass Contributor

In the past in September, we have used below columns to extract picture/image metadata w.r.t location in SharePoint Online:

  • wic_System_GPS_Latitude
  • wic_System_GPS_Longitude

It worked brilliantly. But unfortunately the functionality doesn't seem to work anymore. We have tried it on Site Assets, Pictures and Document library and also on 2 different tenants .

 

Any pointers would be highly appreciated. Thank you.

 

Regards,

Vishwa

21 Replies

Not to be "that guy" who does not have a solution for you but we are experiencing the same thing.  They must have done an update to SharePoint online that removes this ability.  I've tried in both our classic and modern sites and its not pulling anything from the pictures. 

We saw this on our tenant as well. I contacted and was informed by the MS Office 365 support Team that the feature of SharePoint Online to map the EXIF metadata from image/video files into a Picture/Asset Library field was deprecated without notification to user and that there currently there is no replacement available.
Thanks for the confirmation kcender. It's a real shame since our organization was heavily using this feature so that we could export the location data into our GIS system. If you come across a replacement please let me know. Thanks!

Hi,
The default picture libraries do not let you export the Meta information to excel.

 

However, you can use web part to do that.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Create a web part page or edit a existed web part page.

2. Add a web part and choose the picture library stored the images.

3. Modify this web part, select which meta need to be exported by Edit the current view and set the Toolbar Type to Full toolbar, you will find the Export To Spreadsheet in the Action menu.

 

Hope the information can be helpful.

-Nikhil John

Sharepoint system admin

 

John Nikhil,

 

Its not that we are having trouble exporting metadata to Excel, its that the picture libraries no longer extract the EXIF data from the pictures so that we can get the longitude and latitude values from them.

It's not even bringing in 'Date Taken', so now I have a media library with 35,000 items in it and climbing, for which any subsequent items I will not be able to sort or filter by 'Date Taken' for me.

 

This is frankly unacceptable.  I can't believe there hasn't been more of a storm over this.

 

What use is a photo library you can't even sort by date???

Totally agree with that.

 

A picture gallery has to support exif and iptc metadata such as "date taken", GPS Information, title etc. to enable the professional user to benefit of it. A picture Gallery without this functionality doesn't make much sense. The value is all about the content.

 

We appreciate Microsoft to take care of ist customers needs and hope this issue will be solved quickly.

We have dozens of facility project libraries with thousands of documentation photos that must have date picture taken to be of any use. We'd be grateful if this can be repaired quickly.

From my support ticket with MS, this feature isn't broken, it has been deprecated.

 

To reinstate the automatic EXIF parsing for pictures/videos feature, we would need to contact MS Support individually to bother them, or create a request on the UserVoice site and gain other user support.

I have created a uservoice suggestion to bring it back.  Please VOTE!!! If we don't have at least 100 votes within 30 days the suggestion gets dropped.

 

https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/36665011-bring-ba...

 

Done!

 

Hopefully, they'll listen.  Being able to bring the GPS coordinates was really useful, but a media library that won't sort by date taken is worthless if you ask me.

From my opinion this is a service that deserves additional extensions and not any kind of deprecation. We build several small MAM solutions for our customers, that from now on do not work with SPO anymore. Actually we are evaluating FLOW to re-classify images in SharePoint with EXIF data.

 

Thanks for the user voice!

Bjoern

There is a 3rd party tool named SLIM Companion Explorer. It mimics "Open in Explorer" in a browser and supports extraction of metadata from multiple image file formats such as jpg, png, gif, bmp, svg and tiff plus commonly used file formats such as PDF. Office formats (docx, pptx, ..), emails (msg, eml), ...

The tool allows mapping of properties in the original documents to SharePoint columns. 
It supports metadata frameworks like EXIF, IPTC, XMP, ..
Note: I am affiliated with the vendor.
Paul | SLIM Applications

@Adam YoungAny luck resolving this Adam?  I can't believe they removed this.

@Martin Muldoon Unfortunately as far as I can tell Microsoft has not released anything about restoring this ability.  I would love to hear an explanation from Microsoft on why its been removed and what their alternative will be. 

@Adam Young It appears they're developing for the minimum viable product as MS devs modernize SharePoint's front-end.  Is the ability to vote for this functionality removed/disabled?

Hello @Fred Bentler,

 

is there a solution for the problem by now? I am trying to import the imagetags

 

Thanks very much!

@AlexCap No SP solution that I see or have heard about yet. I assume it's a casualty of modernizing SharePoint's front-end and was left out of the minimum viable product and whatever subsequent updates were rolled out.  Hopefully it's in the to-do list yet though


@AlexCap wrote:

Hello @Fred Bentler,

 

is there a solution for the problem by now? I am trying to import the imagetags

 

Thanks very much!



.

Just a quick question. Are the EXIF metadata at least still be in the picture OR are they being stripped of the picture during import? That would be a total desaster.