PyExifTool

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.

Getting PyExifTool

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

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

Alternatively, you can download a tarball. There haven't been any releases yet.

Installation

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

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

to automatically install that module.

Documentation

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

Licence

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.