auto mask or fuzz out text on jpgs

bigfreddiel

i have a few thousand jpgs with the date time embedded in the image - its not data that i can edit out - its part of the image.

is there any s/w or method ican use to mask or fuzz out the date in bulk - the ata is always in the same place and size so I can specify where and how big an area to blur out.

any advice welcomed

asbokid

bigfreddiel wrote: »

i have a few thousand jpgs with the date time embedded in the image - its not data that i can edit out - its part of the image.

is there any s/w or method i can use to mask or fuzz out the date in bulk - the data is always in the same place and size so I can specify where and how big an area to blur out.

any advice welcomed

It's definitely possible to do this with the Imagemagick library. It's a free library which makes it even better :j

The convert tool from Imagemagick also allows for batch processing of many thousands of images.

There are a variety of techniques that you could use to hide the date text.

you could..

Crop the images, or
Overwrite the dateline with a solid colour background, or
Fuzz the dateline with a pixelate mask


Or you could be really clever and..

1. create a mask that exactly overlays the text of the date line
2. cut out that mask to leave a transparent hole in the image
3. blur the image to fill the hole using the surrounding colours
4. do a 3-layer overlay of the original image, the mask and the blurred image

From here... http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/photos/#removing
See also here... http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?p=41498#p41498

asbokid

If you were going to do this professionally, you would need to:

1. Discover the typeface and font point used by the camera for the date/time stamp
2. Use identify from Imagemagick to obtain the DateTime value from EXIF metadata for each image
3. Create a unique mask for the date/time stamp in each image, based on 1. and 2. above
4. Cut out that mask to leave a transparent hole in the image
5. Blur the image to fill the hole using the surrounding colours
6. Do a 3-layer overlay of the original image, the mask and the blurred image

See http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/photos/#exif
And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format#Example

bigfreddiel

that sounds just what i want to do cheers fj

asbokid wrote: »

It's definitely possible to do this with the Imagemagick library. It's a free library which makes it even better :j

The convert tool from Imagemagick also allows for batch processing of many thousands of images.

From here... http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/photos/#removing
See also here... http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?p=41498#p41498