Read barcode or QR code inside image and save it in the file as metadata

It would be absolutely incredibly useful to me as a volume photographer, and I suspect other photographers too.  Anybody who needs to link data to images or catalogue images would be the target market.

Let me outline a conversation that I had with a Lightroom developer at TTG recently, who unfortunately can't help me...

Original Conversation is at:  Lightroom 6 (Page 1) — General — Community @ The Turning Gate (post 17 onwards).

Automatically matching and syncing data to pictures is a huge software industry in its own right, believe me.

As a school photographer (though not solely), matching student IDs to their pictures makes everything so much easier and is vital to update student record databases with images of pupils.  But it's also very relevant to other sectors such as events and sports photographers.  Imagine if this data could be incorporated into TTG database search facility.... (Do we have a swoon smiley?)

Several pieces of commercial software is available, but most rely on the camera being permanently tethered to a laptop and using a barcode scanner to renames files as they come in.  This is a crap, restrictive system but is the one the vast majority of people use.  An example of this is the Australian Timestone software (http://timestonesoftware.com) which is very popular, but runs into the thousands of UK Pounds for a licence.

An American photographer called Mike Fulton wrote a piece of software called fotovelocity.net which does exactly what I prefer - to photograph the pupil with a barcode somewhere in the image that later gets read by the software and data appended to the metadata of the image.  This is slightly cheaper than Timestone, but still runs into the thousands and he not interested in dealing with anybody outside the US.  

If Lightroom can read and guess faces to add naming data, then it must surely be an easy upgrade to read an easily scannable QR code?

and ...

Has to be relevant to more than just me, surely?

Imagine all the events / dance meets / clubs / nurseries / schools / football photographers that would use this.  Admittedly, this is all volume 'hot-dog' photography and not the artistic side, but it puts a fairly nice roof over my head.

With schools I get a database beforehand, but for most events you don't need to know anything about the attendees to the event beforehand, as you just print out labels that have qr codes with sequenced numbers on them which the portrait subject (or their parents) then keep.  They then either visit a printing booth and type the code or take it home and type the code into their browsers and #kabam# up comes their images for purchase.  How they run it so that only the first image has the barcode visible yet all subsequent images retain the data from the first image until another barcode is detected I don't know.  I guess it must be that a numeric sequence must also be appended to the data from the barcode.

It's a wonderful system for photographers, which is why it costs megabucks.

I will admit though, that the commercial software tends to lab integrate as well, so there is more than just barcode reading.  Unfortunately, this ties you in to the system that your preferred lab uses, usually Timestone in the UK, and hence why people have to pay those silly license prices.

If you need a sample image with a QR code in just let me know.

Maybe fotoveolcity instructional videos may give you an impression of how this type of software flows and performs.

General Volume Workflow ‹ Foto Velocity