bellingcat/open-source-research-notebooks

Notebook: exiftools

msramalho opened this issue · 7 comments

msramalho commented

Tool: https://exiftool.org/
Goals:

  • explain what the tool does and it's caveats (any?)
  • show people how to use online services that work for a single file, for example: https://exif.tools/ and mention potential privacy issues
  • show how to use the CLI tool to get the exif metadata for multiple files
  • possibly a simple way to search over the metadata (for example by author, or created date)
  • ability to export as CSV (or other formats)
  • how to modify the metadata of a given file
  • how to remove all metadata from a file

Any other ideas that seem relevant are welcome.

amithr commented

Hi Miguel,

Just to be clear, to get started with this, should I download the Unix distribution for this program, upload it into my Notebook, build it, and then execute it there? This seems to be available as a standalone executable on multiple OSes or a Perl package, but not a Python package.

amithr commented

Never mind - I think I can download and work with the Perl package in a Notebook fairly easily. Not sure why I was fixated on the idea of only using Python...

msramalho commented

That's a valid concern, on colab it should be easy to install you can likewise do apt install XYZ if needed for those dependencies, but do add a note that it won't work on Windows machines.

amithr commented

Hi Miguel,

Here's a link to what I have so far.

Is there anything you think I should add? More specifically, what could be added to the FAQ?

msramalho commented

Hi Amith,

I missed this notification and we ended-up doing some duplicate work 😢

I've made the notebook available here.

I ended up not focusing too much on the metadata editing features since that's typically not so relevant for research.

Do you want to do this the other way around and review my notebook and bring some more info or context from yours? I see the FAQ, features and limitations and some other parts as useful context.

amithr commented

No worries, I'll take a look and see if there's anytime I can add from mine - the command for finding files based on some criteria will probably be useful additions.

msramalho commented

Thank you, I'm pushing to structure things this week and add some others, check the current readme.