PyExifTool is a Python library to communicate with an instance of Phil Harvey's excellent ExifTool command-line application. The library provides the class exiftool.ExifTool that runs the command-line tool in batch mode and features methods to send commands to that program, including methods to extract meta-information from one or more image files. Since exiftool is run in batch mode, only a single instance needs to be launched and can be reused for many queries. This is much more efficient than launching a separate process for every single query.

The source code can be checked out from the github repository with

git clone git://github.com/sylikc/pyexiftool.git

Alternatively, you can download a tarball.

Official releases are on PyPI

https://pypi.org/project/PyExifTool/

PyExifTool runs on Python 2.6 and above, including 3.x. It has been tested on Windows and Linux, and probably also runs on other Unix-like platforms.

You need an installation of the exiftool command-line tool. The code has been tested with version 8.60, but should work with version 8.40 or above (which was the first production version of exiftool featuring the -stay_open option for batch mode).

PyExifTool currently only consists of a single module, so you can simply copy or link this module to a place where Python finds it, or you can call

(It is being slowly re-factored to a module to keep exiftool.py from growing astronomically)

python setup.py install [--user|--prefix=<installation-prefix]

to automatically install that module.

Run tests to make sure it's functional

python -m unittest -v tests/test_exiftool.py

The documentation is available at http://smarnach.github.io/pyexiftool/.

PyExifTool is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the licence, or (at your option) any later version, or the BSD licence.

PyExifTool is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See COPYING.GPL or COPYING.BSD for more details.