issue_comments

I'm not familiar with ExifReader. I wrote my own wrapper around exiftool because I wanted a simple way to write EXIF data when exporting photos (e.g. writing out to PersonInImage and keywords to IPTC:Keywords) and the existing python packages like pyexiftool didn't do quite what I wanted. If all you're after is the camera and shot info, that's available in ZEXTENDEDATTRIBUTES table. I've got an open issue #11 to add this to osxphotos but it hasn't bubbled to the top of my backlog yet.

osxphotos will give you the location info: PhotoInfo.location returns a tuple of (lat, lon) though this info is in ZEXTENDEDATTRIBUTES too (though it might not be correct as I believe Photos creates this table at import and the user might have changed the location of a photo, e.g. if camera didn't have GPS).

sql CREATE TABLE ZEXTENDEDATTRIBUTES ( Z_PK INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, Z_ENT INTEGER, Z_OPT INTEGER, ZFLASHFIRED INTEGER, ZISO INTEGER, ZMETERINGMODE INTEGER, ZSAMPLERATE INTEGER, ZTRACKFORMAT INTEGER, ZWHITEBALANCE INTEGER, ZASSET INTEGER, ZAPERTURE FLOAT, ZBITRATE FLOAT, ZDURATION FLOAT, ZEXPOSUREBIAS FLOAT, ZFOCALLENGTH FLOAT, ZFPS FLOAT, ZLATITUDE FLOAT, ZLONGITUDE FLOAT, ZSHUTTERSPEED FLOAT, ZCAMERAMAKE VARCHAR, ZCAMERAMODEL VARCHAR, ZCODEC VARCHAR, ZLENSMODEL VARCHAR );

@simonw FYI, osxphotos includes a built in ExifTool class that uses exiftool to read and write exif data. It's not exposed yet in the docs because I really only use it right now in the osphotos command line interface to write tags when exporting. In v0.28.16 (just pushed) I added an ExifTool.as_dict() method which will give you a dict with all the exif tags in a file. For example:

python import osxphotos photos = osxphotos.PhotosDB().photos() exiftool = osxphotos.exiftool.ExifTool(photos[0].path) exifdata = exiftool.as_dict() tags = exifdata["IPTC:Keywords"]

Not as elegant perhaps as a python only implementation because ExifTool has to make subprocess calls to an external tool but exiftool is by far the best tool available for reading and writing EXIF data and it does support HEIC.

As for implementation, ExifTool uses a singleton pattern so the first time you instantiate it, it spawns an IPC to exiftool but then keeps it open and uses the same process for any subsequent calls (even on different files).