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/smarnach/pyexiftool.gitAlternatively, you can download a tarball. There haven't been any releases yet.
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.
The documentation is available at http://smarnach.github.com/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.