exiftool-rs

A faithful Rust port of ExifTool 13.60 — read, write, and edit metadata in image, audio, video, and document files. ExifTool's own modules are embedded in the program and run by a Perl interpreter written in Rust, with ExifTool's subs and the exiftool application ported to Rust one by one: the output is ExifTool's, and no Perl installation is needed. The C libraries it needs (PCRE2, zlib) are built in.

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• ExifTool 13.60 itself: every format, tag table, conversion, option and message is ExifTool's, run from its own code. ExifTool's test suite (t/*.t: 114 scripts, 604 tests) passes unchanged, every test image extracts identically, and the CLI is compared with Perl's exiftool case by case (see Testing)
• A CLI, exiftool-rs, with every option of the exiftool application
• A Rust API (exiftool_rs::ExifTool) over Image::ExifTool, the same as the 0.x releases' (see MIGRATION.md and docs/port/API.md)
• Writers for what ExifTool only reads: MP3/AIFF ID3, FLAC, Ogg, Opus and Matroska (extra-writers feature, on by default, API only)
• Optional GUI in 23 languages: ExifTool's 18 and Arabic, Bengali, Hindi and Portuguese

exiftool-rs runs ExifTool's own code, so what it reads, prints and writes is ExifTool's; the program is one compiled binary with no Perl installation behind it. How it is built: docs/port/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Every format ExifTool 13.60 reads and writes, with ExifTool's maker notes and timed metadata (-ee): exiftool-rs -listf lists the readable types, exiftool-rs -listwf the writable ones, as exiftool does. Through the Rust API, the extra-writers feature also writes MP3/AIFF (ID3), FLAC, Ogg, Opus and Matroska, which ExifTool reads only.

use exiftool_rs::ExifTool;

let et = ExifTool::new();
let tags = et.extract_info("photo.jpg").unwrap();
for tag in &tags {
    println!("{}: {}", tag.name, tag.print_value);
}

Note for library consumers: The win-icon feature should only be enabled when building standalone binaries. If you use exiftool-rs as a library dependency, do not enable win-icon — it would inject a Windows VERSION resource into your own binary and cause linker conflicts.

# Install (CLI only)
cargo install exiftool-rs

# Install with GUI
cargo install exiftool-rs --features gui

# Read metadata
exiftool-rs photo.jpg

# Short tag names
exiftool-rs -s photo.jpg

# JSON output
exiftool-rs -j photo.jpg

# Write tags
exiftool-rs -Artist="John Doe" -Copyright="2024" photo.jpg

# Show groups
exiftool-rs -G photo.jpg

# Numeric values
exiftool-rs -n photo.jpg

# Extract embedded GPS from dashcam video
exiftool-rs -ee video.mp4

exiftool-rs includes an optional graphical interface built with egui.

# Install with GUI support
cargo install exiftool-rs --features gui

# Launch the GUI
exiftool-rs-gui

# Or with a specific language
exiftool-rs-gui -lang fr

Features:

• Open files or folders, navigate with arrow keys
• View all metadata grouped by category
• Double-click any writable tag to edit it
• Copy all metadata to clipboard
• Save edits back to the file
• Light, dark or system theme, kept in the settings
• 23 languages supported (CJK, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali fonts included via noto-fonts-dl)

The GUI follows the usual accessibility recommendations; it has not been tested end to end with a screen reader or a braille display, and reports from people who use them are welcome.

• Screen readers: every control and every metadata row has an accessible name and state (a value reads as its description, its value, and whether it is writable or edited), exposed through AccessKit to Narrator and NVDA on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and Orca on Linux. A test walks the accessibility tree and fails on an unnamed control.
• Keyboard: everything is reachable with Tab and Enter; Ctrl+O (⌘O) opens, Ctrl+S (⌘S) saves, Alt+← and Alt+→ move between files (or ←, →, Home and End when no field has the focus).
• Contrast: every text and control color of the light and dark themes meets WCAG 2 AA against its background (4.5:1), checked by the tests.

Tag descriptions and PrintConv values are ExifTool's own translations (e.g. Orientation reads Horizontale (normale) under -lang fr), English where ExifTool has none; the four languages ExifTool does not have come from locales/.

Every option of ExifTool 13.60's exiftool application (exiftool-rs -h; docs/port/CLI.md). The most used:

# The crate's tests. Those that need Perl ExifTool's source tree (13.60) read
# it from $EXIFTOOL_DIR, or ../exiftool next to this repository, and are
# skipped without it.
EXIFTOOL_DIR=/path/to/exiftool cargo test --release

# The judges, against Perl ExifTool (docs/port/CLI.md)
bash scripts/run_suite.sh /path/to/exiftool       # ExifTool's t/*.t: 114 scripts, 604/604
bash scripts/compare_images.sh /path/to/exiftool  # every t/images file, extracted identically
cargo build --release --bin exiftool-rs
PORT_BIN=$PWD/target/release/exiftool-rs python3 -I scripts/compare_cli.py /path/to/exiftool

src/bin/parity (feature parity, needs perl, plus curl and tar to fetch the pinned ExifTool release into target/parity/) runs exiftool-rs and Perl ExifTool 13.60 over the corpus in tests/images/ and compares them. The published report is generated from it by .github/workflows/pages.yml on every release:

cargo run --release --features parity --bin parity                 # gate: fail on a new read delta or write failure
cargo run --release --features parity --bin parity -- --update     # refresh both baselines
cargo run --release --features parity --bin parity -- --dump \
  | python3 scripts/parity_report.py > index.html                   # the report page

The report has two parts.

• Read: every tag of every corpus file, as printed by exiftool -s -G1 and by exiftool-rs (Group1:Tag and value), with an ISO column. Known deltas are listed in tests/parity_live_baseline.txt.
• Write: every corpus file whose type exiftool-rs writes (any file for which write_info does not answer "writing not yet supported") gets a few edits, chosen from what the file contains and the metadata families its writer handles: set an existing tag, add a tag, delete a tag, delete a whole group (EXIF:all, GPS:all, XMP:all, IPTC:all), and a mixed edit. The same edits are applied with set_new_value + write_info and with the ExifTool CLI. Both outputs are then re-read by Perl ExifTool (-a -s -G0:1, the independent referee), and ours also by exiftool-rs. Each case checks that the requested state is there, that the tags equal those of Perl's output, that our reader reads our file the way Perl does, and that Perl reports no new error or warning. A case where write_info returned Ok but the output is byte-identical, or a requested change is missing while Perl made it, is reported as a silent no-op, the most severe result. Known failing cases are listed in tests/parity_write_baseline.txt. The page lists the tags left out of the comparison: file-system and tool state (FileModifyDate, FileSize, ExifToolVersion, and so on), XMPToolkit, and the offsets of embedded images, which depend on the block layout.

The optional Perl modules ExifTool needs to decode the whole corpus are checked at start (Archive::Zip, IO::Compress::Brotli, Compress::Raw::Lzma, POSIX::strptime, Unicode::LineBreak).

git clone https://github.com/Le-Syl21/exiftool-rs
cd exiftool-rs

# CLI only
cargo build --release

# CLI + GUI
cargo build --release --features gui

# With Windows icon embedded in the .exe
cargo build --release --features win-icon

A C compiler is needed: PCRE2 (Perl's regular expressions) and zlib (so that compressed output is byte for byte Perl's) are built into the program.

The gui feature is optional and not included by default. Without it, the GUI dependencies (egui, eframe, image, rfd, noto-fonts-dl) are not downloaded or compiled.

The win-icon feature embeds an icon into the Windows .exe via winres. It is disabled by default to avoid conflicts with frameworks like Tauri that manage their own Windows resources.

GPL-3.0-or-later. Perl ExifTool, whose modules are embedded (data/), is free software under the same terms as Perl itself (GPL or Artistic License).

• Sylvain (@Le-Syl21) — Project creator
• Claude (Anthropic) — Implementation

Based on ExifTool by Phil Harvey. Its modules, embedded in data/, are run by the port's interpreter.

Thanks to RAW-Samples.ch, whose RAW files (metadata only) make up our rawsamples test corpus, and to julyx10, author of Lap, for many detailed reports and much testing.