Good metadata image dump utilities?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2166048

Question

I'm looking for the best tool out there to extract any and all metadata embedded within the most popular image file formats (JPEG and PNG specifically). I would like to know about whatever is in there (XMP, Exif, IPTC/IIM, etc.). Ideally I am looking for an all-in-one solution that I can run from a command line, but am interested to hear about any other tools in this area that are of value.

I have found the following, each with advantages/disadvantages:

  • ExifTool is good, but the output is a little more roughshod that I would like.
  • DumpImage from the Metadata Working Group has good formatting of the metadata it does find, but doesn't support PNG.
Was it helpful?

Solution

I have recently released Binspector, the tool I ended up writing to answer this question to my own satisfaction. The basic premise of the tool is that it takes a format grammar and uses it to analyze a binary file. As long as the format grammar and the binary file are well-formed, one can inspect and analyze innumerable binary files and formats.

Code is hosted on GitHub, and a blog for the tool is here. (The overview post for the tool is here.)

OTHER TIPS

As you did not mention any preferred programming language I take PHP as an example. There is an Exif Extension for PHP which can be used to easily retrieve Metadata from an Image.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exif-read-data.php

You could easily create a script that you can call from the command line. I must add that the extension only seems to provide support for JPEG and TIFF images.

You could try the official ADOBE XMP SDK. It is available for download at :

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp.html

This is the complete SDK to read/write/manipulate metadata across a variety of formats.

In the SDK package there is one particular sample that might be of interest to you. Go to the "samples" folder build the samples as per documentation (available in the package). Look for the sample exe "DumpFile". This dumps all the metadata in the file to the console.

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