Monday, June 5, 2017

Extract GPS tags from photographs into a CSV file using Exiftool

There is a nice command line utility Exiftool from http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ that can be used to quickly extract out the GPS positions and other tags from photographs and other images into a comma separated values (CSV) file.

The following example uses the Windows executable version of the utility to illustrated the extraction steps.

  1. Open up a Windows Command Prompt. In the prompt, type in the command.

    C:\> "exiftool(-k).exe" -n -gpslongitude -gpslatitude -gpstimestamp -csv D:\MyDocuments\temp\somephotos

    Note:
    -n means to print out as numbers only
    -csv prints out csv including the file path and name
    -D points to the folder directory of the photographs to extract
  2. Press RETURN

    The extraction values are displayed to the screen.

  3. To output to a file, use the > character to redirect the standard output to a file, e.g. type in the command:

    C:\> "exiftool(-k).exe" -n -gpslongitude -gpslatitude -gpstimestamp -csv D:\MyDocuments\temp\somephotos > outgps.csv

    The output file outgps.csv is created.
  4. Display the resultant file in a spreadsheet. Or plot the locations on a map.


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