Wacheee/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper v4.0.1-wacheee-Xentraxx-beta

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This change is a big overhaul of the project, so only the major improvements or potential breaking changes are mentioned

This version was developed mainly by @Xentraxx (https://github.com/Xentraxx/)

Tl;dr

• Added support for reading EXIF data from JXL (JPEG XL), ARW, RAW, DNG, CRW, CR3, NRW, NEF and RAF files internally.
• Adeded support for reading and writing coordinates and DateTime from and to exif for almost all file formats.
• Added a "--write-exif" flag which will write missing EXIF information (coordinates and DateTime) from json to EXIF for jpg and jpeg files
• Added support to get DateTime from .MOV, .MP4 and probably many other video formats through exiftool. You need to download it yourself (e.g. from here: https://exiftool.org/), rename it to exiftool.exe and make sure the folder you keep it in is in your $PATH variable or in the same folder as gpth.
• Added verbose mode (--verbose or -v)
• File size is not limited anymore by default but can be limited using the --limit-filesize flag for systems with low RAM (like a NAS).
• Fixed PhotoMigrator integration by finding exiftool in more locations.
• Fixed some typos
• Fixed emoji to hex encoding and decoding and added support for BMP emojis in addition to surrowgate.
• Fixed some tests

General improvements

• upgraded dependencies and fixed breaking changes
• updated dart to a minimum version of 3.8.0 of the dart SDK
• included image, intl and coordinate_converter packages
• applied a list of coding best practices through lint rules to code
• added/edited a bunch of comments and changed unnecessary print() to log() for debugging and a better user experience
• Divided code in steps through comments and included steps in output for readability, debuggability and to make it easier to follow the code
• checked TODOs in README.md
• Added TODOs to look into in code through //TODO comments
• moved json_extractor file into date_extractor folder
• added unit tests for new write-exif functionality
• made CLI --help output more readable through line breaks
• renamed some variables/functions to better reflect their purpose
• moved step 8 (update creation time) before final output
• added output how often DateTime and Coordinates have been written in EXIF at the final output
• changed that test data will be created in test subfolder instead of project root directory
• Added consistent log levels to log output to quickly differenciate between informational and error logs
• Added logging of elapsed time for each step.
• Exposed the maxFileSize flag as an argument (--limit-filesize) to set if necessary, It's now deactivated by default to support larger files like videos.
• Added DateTime extraction method statistics to the final output - shows how many files had their dates extracted through which method
• Added elapsed time logging for each processing step
• Improved Github actions

Bug fixes

• fixed existing unit tests which would fail on windows
• Fixed Github Actions

Added functionality

• Support for writing coordinates and DateTime to EXIF

  • Added new CLI option "--write-exif".
  • When enabled, the script will check if the associated json of any given file contains coordinates and if the file does not yet have them in its EXIF data, the script will add them.
  • When enabled, the script will check if a DateTime has been extracted from any of the given extraction methods and if the file has no EXIF DateTime set, it will add the DateTime to the EXIF data 'DateTime', 'DateTimeOriginal'and 'DateTimeDigitized'.
  • Added verbose mode (--verbose or -v) with log levels info, warning and error.

• Moved from the stale "exif" package to "exif_reader" for dart local exif reading, the image library for local jpeg exif writing and the external exiftool for all other EXIF reading and writing (images and videos)

  • The move to exif_reader adds support for extracting DateTime from JXL (JPEG XL), ARW, RAW, DNG, CRW, CR3, NRW, NEF and RAF files, and video formats like MOV, MP4, etc.
  • Exiftool needs to be in $PATH variable or in the same folder as the running binary. If not, that's okay. Then we fall back to exif_reader. But if you have ExifTool locally, Google Photos Takeout Helper now supports reading CreatedDateTime EXIF data for almost all media formats.

• Added new interactive prompts:

  • Option to write EXIF data to files (--write-exif)
  • Option to limit file size for systems with low RAM (--limit-filesize)

Limitations

• As mentioned on the PR #13 (comment) this version can be slower than 3.6.x-wacheee in Windows because is using PowerShell to create shortcuts (FFI is causing heap exception)