{"slug": "exiftool", "name": "ExifTool", "category": "terminal", "category_name": "Terminal and shell", "description": "", "recommenders": 4, "commenters": 10, "warners": 0, "score": 4.911, "rising": -1.31, "first": "2025-11-21", "latest": "2026-06-13", "why": "there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 6, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "exiftool.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://exiftool.org/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["ExifTool", "exiftool"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 776395760, "item_id": 48524735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524735", "by": "pchm", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Exiftool handles pretty much all of that.", "excerpt": "Yes. I run a niche webapp[1] that extracts exif and xmp (Lightroom edits) from images. At one point I tried to write my own exif parser. It's not that complicated, but very quickly you'll run into weird legacy, vendor-specific nuances (apart from what the parent mentioned, you have to handle both big & little endian exif). And the long tail of those edge cases is, well, very long. Exiftool handles pretty much all of ", "context": "", "use_case": "Image metadata extraction", "switched_from": "", "story": "Appreciating Exif"}, {"id": 749430225, "item_id": 46839389, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839389", "by": "mceachen", "date": "2026-01-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!)", "excerpt": "I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax Google Takeouts into working: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/ Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/ FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)"}, {"id": 736090608, "item_id": 46005663, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005663", "by": "malinens", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats", "excerpt": "On related note there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats https://exiftool.org/ And it has it's own forums with tens of thousands of posts!", "context": "", "use_case": "Image metadata inspection", "switched_from": "", "story": "EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image"}, {"id": 736081808, "item_id": 46005113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005113", "by": "postalcoder", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love ExifTool. It\u2019s one of the great utilities.", "excerpt": "As a former metadata completionist, my mind starts to dissociate when I think about my battles with EXIF metadata, vendor-specific metadata, and the way different software supports, or refuses to support, any of it. It gets even worse when ingesting images into Apple Photos, where you have to confront papercut bugs that you know will never be fixed. I love ExifTool. It\u2019s one of the great utilities. It works for almos", "context": "former metadata completionist", "use_case": "image metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "linkregister", "context": "Linux desktop user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361433", "date": "2025-12-22"}, {"by": "postalcoder", "context": "former metadata completionist", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005113", "date": "2025-11-21"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["image metadata extraction", "reading exif gps metadata", "reading exif metadata", "custom metadata tags", "renaming photos by date", "image metadata inspection"], "compared": [{"slug": "adobe-lightroom", "name": "Adobe Lightroom", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631118", "title": "Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004364", "title": "EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467437", "title": "Appreciating Exif", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222733", "title": "Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286408", "title": "Filesystems Are Having a Moment", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46794971", "title": "My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 2}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 776395760, "item_id": 48524735, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524735", "by": "pchm", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Exiftool handles pretty much all of that.", "excerpt": "Yes. I run a niche webapp[1] that extracts exif and xmp (Lightroom edits) from images. At one point I tried to write my own exif parser. It's not that complicated, but very quickly you'll run into weird legacy, vendor-specific nuances (apart from what the parent mentioned, you have to handle both big & little endian exif). And the long tail of those edge cases is, well, very long. Exiftool handles pretty much all of ", "context": "", "use_case": "Image metadata extraction", "switched_from": "", "story": "Appreciating Exif"}, {"id": 771601218, "item_id": 48225076, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225076", "by": "asenna", "date": "2026-05-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "EXIF GPS via exiftool", "excerpt": "1) It's just simple plain-text `.description.md` sidecar files, one per clip, sitting next to each video. Something which I can query later - Like when brainstorming with Claude \"I wanna make some videos of the Luxury rooms in the lodge\" and it knows what all videos could help here (going through the files). There's also a folder root level files that aggregates the text descriptions to make it easier to find. I've j", "context": "", "use_case": "reading EXIF GPS metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Indexing a year of video locally on a 2021 MacBook with Gemma4-31B (50GB swap)"}, {"id": 762120849, "item_id": 47632553, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632553", "by": "layer8", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Before Lightroom it might have looked closer to this: https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/art002e000193/art002e000193~large.jpg", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth"}, {"id": 762119313, "item_id": 47632457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632457", "by": "hannesfur", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Looking at the EXIF (with exiftool)", "excerpt": "Looking at the EXIF (with exiftool) for the image uploaded by NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/art002e000192.jpg), apparently this was taken by a Nikon D5 with an AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED and developed with Lightroom. It also seems like very little was done in Lightroom. Amazing... I dumped the whole EXIF here: https://gist.github.com/umgefahren/a6f555e6588a98adb74eed79d734012c", "context": "", "use_case": "reading EXIF metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth"}, {"id": 756799328, "item_id": 47299958, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299958", "by": "jmathai", "date": "2026-03-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags", "excerpt": "I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for \u201calbum\u201d. https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922 Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don\u2019t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands. https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTool_config", "context": "", "use_case": "custom metadata tags", "switched_from": "", "story": "Filesystems Are Having a Moment"}, {"id": 749430225, "item_id": 46839389, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839389", "by": "mceachen", "date": "2026-01-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!)", "excerpt": "I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax Google Takeouts into working: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/ Also: you should try out the latest build! https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/ FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes things a bit more ergonomic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)"}, {"id": 741782929, "item_id": 46361433, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361433", "by": "linkregister", "date": "2025-12-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use exiftool to rename the files from IMG_0123.HEIC to the date the image or video was taken", "excerpt": "I save my iPhone photos to my linux desktop. The default image viewing software in the Gnome 3 window manager can display HEIC images. Conversions on the command line are simple enough with imagemagick. Prior to conversion, I use exiftool to rename the files from IMG_0123.HEIC to the date the image or video was taken, followed by a truncated sha256 digest of the file, e.g. 2025-12-22-1732-f8b7302.HEIC. Otherwise, you", "context": "Linux desktop user", "use_case": "renaming photos by date", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How are most people converting HEIC to jpg?"}, {"id": 740722576, "item_id": 46295161, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295161", "by": "mnorris", "date": "2025-12-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I ran exiftool on an image I just generated", "excerpt": "I ran exiftool on an image I just generated: $ exiftool chatgpt_image.png ... Actions Software Agent Name : GPT-4o Actions Digital Source Type : http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/digitalsourcetype/trainedAlgorithmicMedia Name : jumbf manifest Alg : sha256 Hash : (Binary data 32 bytes, use -b option to extract) Pad : (Binary data 8 bytes, use -b option to extract) Claim Generator Info Name : ChatGPT ...", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT Image 1.5"}, {"id": 736090608, "item_id": 46005663, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005663", "by": "malinens", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats", "excerpt": "On related note there is exiftool which tries to understand all those different formats https://exiftool.org/ And it has it's own forums with tens of thousands of posts!", "context": "", "use_case": "Image metadata inspection", "switched_from": "", "story": "EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image"}, {"id": 736081808, "item_id": 46005113, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005113", "by": "postalcoder", "date": "2025-11-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love ExifTool. It\u2019s one of the great utilities.", "excerpt": "As a former metadata completionist, my mind starts to dissociate when I think about my battles with EXIF metadata, vendor-specific metadata, and the way different software supports, or refuses to support, any of it. It gets even worse when ingesting images into Apple Photos, where you have to confront papercut bugs that you know will never be fixed. I love ExifTool. It\u2019s one of the great utilities. It works for almos", "context": "former metadata completionist", "use_case": "image metadata", "switched_from": "", "story": "EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image"}]}