Comments on: Getting Photo Metadata (EXIF) Using Python

By: Diane

Diane — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:47:00 +0000

For this post, we’ll take a look at the various 3rd party packages that give you access to this information.Thanks for the tips G-d bless

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:03:59 +0000

@ Karl,

I didn’t find that EXIF program/module. I’ll have to take a look. Thanks!

@ fancy,

I was just showing an example. I would normally use os.path methods but wanted people to be able to follow this article easily. I will be writing about using EXIF data to expand my image viewer program soon.

@ Franz,

I thought pyexiv2 looked cool too and I appreciated its documentation. I hope to try it out on my laptop which has Python 2.6 on it.

@ Anthony,

I think I found another module that can write EXIF data…I might be thinking of that blogger’s link that I mentioned at the end of the article.

Thanks for the information, fellows!

- Mike

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:59:00 +0000

@ Everyone,

My new spam filter was doing too good a job and filtered out a bunch of comments. I apologize for that and will be more careful to check that in the future.

- Mike

By: Anthony Batchelor

Anthony Batchelor — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:18:50 +0000

For the most part, pyexiv2 rocks.
It can read AND WRITE exif data to images. This is important if you want to resize an image using PIL and keep the exif data.

Unfortunately, it chokes on writing some Canon specific tags… There are bug reports about it, but they don’t seem to be making any progress on them…

By: Franz

Franz — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 07:38:59 +0000

Mike,

pyexiv2′s installation under win32 is a bit tricky, but since it is C-based, it rewards you with a much faster reading performance than EXIF.py. Furthermore, you also get write support for metadata, thus you can store photo captions as IPTC metadata, fix bad timestamps or even geo-tag your pictures.

For installing pyexiv2 under Python 2.5, please see Robin Mills pages on pyexiv2 (http://clanmills.com/articles/gpsexiftags/). Maybe he can also help out with a Python 2.5 build of the brand new pyexiv 0.2.0

Franz

By: fancy

fancy — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:10:28 +0000

You should use escaped backslashes, os.path.join, or a raw string for path literals:

import exif
photo_path = r”somePath\to\a\photo.jpg”
data = exif.parse(photo_path)

By: karl

karl — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:53:28 +0000

You can use epinfo as well. It is much faster than anything else I have tried so far. PIL is a bit slow, but I haven’t tried recently.

epinfo can be found here.
http://www.lightner.net/lightner/bruce/photopc/epinfo.html

for example to get the EXIF date, you could do:

epinfo $file | grep DateTimeOriginal