All posts by Jonathan Stassen

Photo Exif Edit

I discovered that is is rather difficult to edit exif tags on photos. Its probably by design to prevent tampering of falsifying information.

I have been creating HDR photos with my Nikon D5000. It’s been a great success and good fun! However my HDR software keeps all the original exif info from the first image in the series. Some of the data is no longer relevant  specifically the the exposure length or ISO! Can you imagine an HDR photo take at 1/1000 sec with a 200ISO? I think not!

Why does it matter? Well my over in my Photo Gallery it shows the camera settings at which each of the photos were shot. It bugs me that on those types of work it shows wrong info!

I spent some time searching and eventually came upon ExifToolGUI.

  • Allows you to edit / remove many exif tags
  • Edit geolocation
  • No cost

It takes a little effort to set it up, but here is a great tutorial of setting it up. But basically you have to place the command line ExifTool in the same directory as the ExifToolGUI app.

Grouping Mailboxes with PowerShell

Here is a snip-it of PowerShell Code I am using to group and count the number of mailboxes on an Microsoft Exchange Server 2008 using CustomAttribute1.

On our server we have a unique ID stored in the CustomAttribute1 for mailboxes that belong to different groupings. For example in the CustomAttribute1 we store the company ID, in CustomAttribute2 we may store the service level they pay for. We found the need to keep a count of the number of mailboxes belonging to different companies.

$CountMembers = @{}
Get-Mailbox | foreach-object {$CountMembers[$_.CustomAttribute1]++}
$CountMembers

Naturally from here we can append the | Out-File Report.txt to save to a txt file. Ideally I would like to export to a csv, however this data format doesn’t support that. I may look further into this in the future.

We can use this method to group mailboxes by any common attribute actually. Say the count the number of mailboxes on each database using $_.Database

Search Everything

I have been using a real nice application “Search Everything” that I think is worth sharing.

Windows search is not my favorite, I find it rather cumbersome, and rather slow. Search Everything takes the application about 5 – 15 seconds to index the entire drive. Search results are returned live as you type. By default it searches all files, temp, system, hidden, you name it.

Here are some creative uses and wildcard searches I often do.

  • To restrict your search to a certain subfolder use a backslash *\windows\*sol.exe
  • To restrict your search to a specific drive letter D:\*sol.exe
  • Finding misplaced files, say a .pst or .doc
  • Verifying the pc has no lingering .doc, .xls, jpg, .pst files before formatting the HDD
  • Also great for finding an infection’s location if you know process file name

The installer or portable version can be found on the developer’s site: http://www.voidtools.com