pyexiv2

Read and write image metadata, including EXIF, IPTC, XMP, ICC Profile.

• Install: pip install pyexiv2
• Source code on GitHub
• Tutorial | 中文教程

Features

• Base on C++ API of Exiv2 and wrapped with pybind11.
• Supports running on 64bit Linux, MacOS and Windows, with CPython(≥3.6) interpreter.
• Supports various image metadata
• Supports various image formats
• Supports opening images based on the file path or from bytes data.
• Supports Unicode characters that contained in image path or metadata.

Defects

• Can't read the image larger than 2GB, or modify the image larger than 1GB. (related issue)
• Not thread safe, because pyexiv2 uses some global variables in C++.
• Currently, if you use ARM platform, you need to compile exiv2 and pyexiv2 manually, which is troublesome. (related issue)

Tests

There are some test cases in folder pyexiv2/tests.

References

• Similar projects:

  • exiv2 is a C++ library for reading and writing various image metadata, including command-line tools.
  • pyexiv2 is a Python2 binding to exiv2, hasn't been updated since 2011.
  • py3exiv2 is a Python3 binding to exiv2, wrapped with Boost.Python.
  • python-exiv2 is a Python3 binding to exiv2, wrapped with SWIG. The intention is to give direct access to all of the top-level classes in exiv2.
  • exiftool is a perl library for reading and writing various image metadata, including command-line tools.

• Books:

  • Robin Mills. "Image Metadata and Exiv2 Architecture". 2021