Phonegap / Cordova camera plugin - how to get photo's date/time stamp?

Question

I have a Phonegap app that needs to let the user both take photos using the phone\'s camera and let the user select from photo\'s already on the device.

I need to ca

Answer 1

So, I've managed to figure this out.

The date/time stamp along with a bunch of other information can be retrieved from the EXIF data tags inside the JPEG file. This can be done using this helpful JS library - https://github.com/jseidelin/exif-js

Unfortunately the Cordova camera plugin for Android doesn't copy EXIF tags when transforming an image selected from the gallery, only when taking an image using the camera, so this is a problem, but I will fix this by forking the plugin. The iOS version of the plugin seems to do this right thing.

Code for anyone interested -

var source = fromCamera 
       ? Camera.PictureSourceType.CAMERA 
       : Camera.PictureSourceType.PHOTOLIBRARY;

var opts = {
    encodingType: Camera.EncodingType.JPEG,
    sourceType: source,
    destinationType: Camera.DestinationType.NATIVE_URI
};

navigator.camera.getPicture(
        function(imageURI) {
            window.resolveLocalFileSystemURL(imageURI,
                    function(entry) {
                        entry.file(function(file) {
                            EXIF.getData(file, function() {
                                var datetime = EXIF.getTag(this, "DateTimeOriginal");
                                alert(datetime);
                            });                                                

                            // do something useful....

                        }, standardErrorHandler);
                    },
                    function(e) {
                        alert('Unexpected error obtaining image file.');
                        standardErrorHandler(e);
                    });
        },
        function() {
            // nada - cancelled
        },
        opts);

Answer 2

Like everyone else I dislike answers that start with "do this a completely different way" but I had the same problems as the original poster and using the alternate camera plugin cordova-plugin-camera-with-exif was the best solution I found.