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Ruby wrapper for ExifTool

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This gem is the simplest thing that could possibly work that reads the output of exiftool and renders it into a ruby hash, with correctly typed values and symbolized keys.

Ruby 3.1 through 3.3 are supported.

Ruby Support Deprecation Notice

Future releases of exiftool Gem will no longer support following Ruby Versions due to their End Of Life announcements:

The latest Exiftool is recommended, but you'll get that automatically by using the exiftool_vendored gem!

Features

Usage

require 'exiftool'
e = Exiftool.new("path/to/iPhone 4S.jpg")
e.to_hash
# => {:make => "Apple", :gps_longitude => -122.47566667, …
e.to_display_hash
# => {"Make" => "Apple", "GPS Longitude" => -122.47566667, …

Multiget support

This gem supports Exiftool's multiget, which lets you fetch metadata for many files at once.

This can be dramatically more efficient than spinning up the exiftool process for each file due to the cost of spinning up perl.

Supply an array to the Exiftool initializer, then use .result_for:

require 'exiftool'
e = Exiftool.new(Dir["**/*.jpg"])
result = e.result_for("path/to/iPhone 4S.jpg")
result.to_hash
# => {:make => "Apple", :gps_longitude => -122.47566667, …
result[:gps_longitude]
# => -122.47566667

Or iterate through files_with_results:

e.files_with_results
# => ["path/to/iPhone 4S.jpg", "path/to/Droid X.jpg", …

Dates without timezones

It seems that most exif dates don't include timezone offsets, without which forces us to assume the current timezone is applicable to the image, which isn't necessarily correct.

To be correct, we punt and return the exiftool-formatted string, which will be something like %Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S.

If the clock was set correctly on your camera, the date will be the correct calendar day as far as you were concerned when you took the photo. Given that, we add a _civil key associated to just the calendar date of the field, which should be safe-ish.

require 'exiftool'
e = Exiftool.new("test/IMG_2452.jpg")
e[:date_time_original]
=> "2011:07:06 09:46:45"
e[:date_time_original_civil]
=> #<Date: 2011-07-06 ((2455749j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

When things go wrong

Exiftool.new("Gemfile").errors?
#=> true

Installation

Step 1: Install ExifTool

The easiest way is to use the "vendored" exiftool in the exiftool_vendored gem. Just add

gem 'exiftool_vendored'

to your Gemfile, run bundle, and you're done. (Note that it depends on the exiftool gem, so really, you're done! Skip step 2!)

If you want to install exiftool on your system yourself:

Step 2: Add the gem

If you didn't use exiftool_vendored, then add this your Gemfile:

gem 'exiftool'

and then run bundle.

If you have exiftool installed outside of ruby's PATH, add an initializer that points the gem to the tool, like this: Exiftool.command = '/home/ruby/Image-ExifTool-9.33/exiftool'. You don't need to do this if you've installed added the exiftool directory to the PATH of the shell that runs ruby.

Change history

1.2.4

1.2.3

1.2.2

1.2.1

1.2.0

1.1.0

1.0.1

0.8.0

0.7.0

0.5.0

0.4.0

0.3.1

0.3.0

0.2.0

0.1.0

0.0.9

0.0.8

0.0.7

0.0.5

Fixed homepage URL in gemspec

0.0.4

Added support for multiple file fetching (which is much faster for large directories)