

ExifTool has the well-deserved reputation of being a flexible and infinitely powerful utility for working with photographic metadata.

Indeed, ExifTool can handle practically every metadata-related task you throw at it: from adding and removing tags to performing advanced actions based on specific values obtained from metadata. In this article, I provide a gentle introduction to ExifTool's capabilities and show how to put this excellent tool to practical use.ĭespite its comprehensive documentation, however, coming to grips with ExifTool can sometimes be a daunting proposition. Inside almost every digital photo hides a wealth of useful metadata. Many photo management applications like digiKam and Darktable make it possible to view and edit metadata. In this section, we'll be installing ExifTool on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions On Ubuntu You can install ExifTool on Ubuntu using the apt utility. As is often the case, however, even the most powerful graphical applications can't compete with command-line tools in terms of speed and efficiency. If you need to process hundreds, or even thousands, of photos on a regular basis, using ExifTool can save you a lot of time and effort. To make use of exiftool you will need to download and install the appropriate exiftool package for your system. Even if you need to modify a handful of photos, doing so with ExifTool can be more efficient than resorting to your preferred photo management application. A node.js wrapper around exiftool, a commandline utility that can extract metadata from many different filetypes, including JPEG, PNG, PDF, WMV, MOV.For a full list see the exiftool list of supported filetypes. The first step is obviously to install ExifTool on your system. Because the utility is available in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, it can be easily installed using your distro's package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu, deploying ExifTool is a matter of running the apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perlĬommand as root. To see ExifTool in action, run the exiftool /path/to/foo.jpgĬommand, which generates a long list of metadata tags and their values pulled from the source photo. But you can create your own package information in your master composer.Besides JPG, ExifTool can handle a wide range of other formats as well as RAW and video files (see the full list of supported formats on the project's website). Since ExifTool is written in Perl, there is of course no composer.json to install this dependency directly with Composer.

I’m working on a PHP project, that uses Phil Harveys excellent ExifTool to read Exif and XMP tags from photos.
