Hi, this is Sandra Henry-Stocker, author of the “Unix as a Second Language” blog on NetworkWorld.
In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at exiftool. It’s an app that you can install on your Linux system to pull metadata from jpg and png files. That metadata provides information such as the date the image was created or last modified, the image size in pixels, the image resolution etc.
For photographs, it also includes a lot of information on the camera or device used. For example, the shutter speed, aperture, brightness, etc. You can also find out when a photo was taken and where it was taken (longitude and latitude).
All these values are stuffed into your image files and extracted and displayed by exiftool with labels so that you can tell what’s what. Beware, though, you’re going to see a LOT of lines of output.
Here’s an example of the information displayed using exiftool to examine it.
Here are a few of those lines you might find interesting. The date the photo was taken:
In this case, you can see that this file taken back in June of 2016.
So, you can determine when a photo was taken, where the photo was taken and what kind of camera was used along with a lot of other details – at least for most photos taken by modern cameras or cell phones.
That’s your Linux tip for exiftool.
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