ExifTool : A Meta-Data Extractor

4 min readFeb 9, 2020

Introduction

ExifTool is developed by Phil Harvey. It is a platform-independent Perl library coupled with a full-featured command-line implementation for reading, writing and manipulating the metadata across a broad range of files, particularly the images. This metadata may comprise a bunch of information such as the camera make, file type, permissions, file size etc. , though it further offers more details about the photograph. ExifTool probably gives us the simplest way to extract metadata from files, as it is free and an open-source program.

ExifTool is CLI based and its inconvenient to use CLI for doing the job when there’s a GUI available. In this article I’ve used pyExifToolGui,which is a graphical frontend for ExifTool. pyExifToolGui is a python pySide QT4 script program.

FEATURES

Extensive renaming options based on metadata in your photos.
Supports all formats exiftool itself supports in “read” mode. Preview thumbnails for standard image formats and most raw formats.
Writes GPS data to (selected) images.
Comes with geo-tagging functionality
Writes several exif and xmp tags to images.
Removes metadata (if you want that).
Supports new Google Photosphere (gpano) functionality (with exiftool >= 9.07)
Modify date-time tags
Modify image file dates based on date-time tags.
Options for exporting (all) tag categories to a series of export options
A tab where you can execute your own commands in case they are not directly supported by the Gui functionality

Installation

pyExifToolGui can be downloaded from following Link,I’ve downloaded the zip file for Windows as that’s the environment I’ll be using.

https://github.com/hvdwolf/pyExifToolGUI/releases

After download,just extract the file and run pyexiftoolgui.exe

After opening the file you’ll get the above screen,just click load image ,then select file whose metadata you wish to edit[file can be image,pdf].

Next,you get all metadata info of that file in View Data section,as shown in image below.

You can see any type of info ,like Exif,xmp,IPTC,GPS,ICC_profile ,in view data section.

Export/Import menu

Export metadata into : TXT, MIE, XMP, EXIF, HTML files

Every of these formats has different purpose: i.e. MIE is for making backup of complete metadata inside image file, HTML is ment for “studying” metadata structure, etc. So, try and see what suits your needs.

Copy metadata from single file

This will copy metadata from single source file (can be MIE file too) into currently selected files. That is, all selected files will be populated with the same metadata. After you choose the source file, you’ll have a chance to reduce the amount of metadata to be copied:

Batch Rename

Select multiple files > Extras > Rename Photos

Then select appropriate criteria of your desire, and click OK.

Modify menu

Exif: DateTime shift

Exif: DateTime equalize

Remove metadata

Select file > Extras > Remove Metadata.

Edit Data

You can edit metadata of any file from this menu with any custom values. You can change GPS coordinates ,Location data ,exif info ,lens info ,etc.

You can also copy this data from a file and save to another file ,make backup of original metadata..

Prefrences

Here you can specify default values for Artist and copyrights.

Conclusion

This was pyExiftoolGui’s complete usability guide as a meta-data extractor and editor. It is user-friendly and convenient because of its simple GUI. It has thus become one of the best tools to extract and manipulate meta-data data from a variety of file formats.