Python Data Analysis Cookbook

Extracting metadata from images

Digital photos often contain extra textual metadata, for example, timestamps, exposure information, and geolocations. Some of this metadata is editable by the camera owner. In the context of marketing, for instance, it can be useful to extract the metadata from profile (or other) images on social media websites. Purportedly, whistle blower Edward Snowden claimed that the American NSA is collecting EXIF metadata from global online data.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will use ExifRead to extract the EXIF metadata.

Install ExifRead as follows:

$ pip install ExifRead

I tested the code with ExifRead 2.1.2.

How to do it...

1. The imports are as follows:

   import exifread
   import pprint

2. Open the image as follows:

   f = open('covers.jpg', ...