When I first released a beta-version of xIFr back in July 2019, I didn't announce it here, because I expected to follow up with "final" version shortly after. However, I first found I needed a little break from coding, and after that unexpected events was stealing my spare time and energy for some time. But now, half a year later, I'm finally ready to "officially" announce my browser extension:...

xIFr 1.0

xIFr is a webbrowser extension to view Exif and other meta data in image files. It's far from the first Exif viewer made for Firefox or other desktop webbrowsers, and xIFr is also a "fork" of one of the other add-ons already available. But I felt I could make something that worked better than the existing offers.

Most current Exif reader addons operates in one of two ways. The first kind opens a window with Exif data from an image, launched by right clicking directly on the image (<img> html element) on the webpage. The second kind can be executed "globally" for the webpage (eventually from a toolbar button) and will display Exif data for found images inline on the webpage. The problem with the first kind is that on modern webpages you can rarely right-click directly on an image element. Very often images is "shielded" behind a layer, or image is actually a background property of another kind of html element. The second kind will maybe work more often. But it will also sometimes break the page it is running on, because it directly modifies it to display the meta data of the photos.

xIFr is a variation of the first kind. But thanks to a new API feature introduced in Firefox 63, I have been able to construct it so you can bring up the browser's contextmenu to launch it, by right-clicking pretty much anywhere on a webpage. xIFr will usually guess which image you were thinking of no matter if you actually was clicking directly on an image element, or you were clicking on a layer over it. And it can also find images that aren't actual image elements on webpages, but are background property of another kind of element. Technically xIFr is searching up and down the DOM tree looking for the likely wanted image close to the element your right-click was registered on. I call the feature for "Deep Search"...

Yes, xIFr is "guessing". But it rarely goes wrong, and is in my opinion much more useful and versatile than other Exif readers I have tried. Besides that, it is also among the best looking ;-)

Currently the only "browser addon store" xIFr is available to install from is Mozilla Firefox Addons. In principle xIFr is a "cross browser compatible" WebExtension, also compatible with f.ex. Google Chrome, Opera and the new Chromium based Edge. But at this time only Firefox offers the API-feature used to make the "Deep Search" functionality, so when installed in other browsers, xIFr can only be launched when you can right-click directly on an image element. But if you want to try it in Chrome or another desktop webbrowser, there's usually a Developer-feature in browsers making it possible to install an add-on directly from the local filesystem. Download the extension (zip-file) from GitHub if you want to install it in your browser this way.

Update, April 2020: I have created a little Introduction page to quickly try the features of xIFr, and maybe compare it with other Exif reader browser extensions.

 

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