exiftool

(Apologies for the verbosity - coffee's strong today ;-) Admittedly, I've not used exiftool exhaustively at this point - but even in an hour or two, I've been amazed at the EASE of use, and the sheer _power_ of the utility. I've been using it command-line for extracting meta from dozens of video files, mp4 in this case (iteratively from my own simple script), for a conversion project I'm working on. The capabilities are incredibly abundant, seriously! I've just scratched the surface at this point, but from what I see - tagging image or video libraries, copying meta from file to file, or consolidating meta from a library in to table/spreadsheet, etc.. is very easily accomplished. When I first saw the utility, I didn't read thoroughly, and so went and got a Perl runtime (Strawberry). I'm an old Perl programmer from years past, and always liked it but haven't used it for some time, so didn't have it installed here (Windows machine). Turns out, _exiftool_ comes with a Perl runtime environment, and automatically uses it via simple relative path within the extracted archive. It is SO wickedly easy - just simply executing the utility from the root of the extracted archive, it loads itself with the included Perl and just RUNS. No troubles at all. It shocked me how quickly I was extracting meta with _simple_ comand-line syntax, e.g. "exiftool.exe -tagname mediafile". You control the output format with various flags as well - tabled, tab-delimited, csv and etc.. I love this utility. It is brilliant in it's ease of use, and it's functionality is... well, _enormous_. FANTASTIC TOOL! Add: exiftool includes perl libraries, so doing really elaborate stuff from within perl scripts/programs seriously adds to it's power and functionality - far beyond the simple, yet powerful, command-line utility. This could certainly be productized, imho. The variety of media it operates upon is huge as well. Impressed as hell.

I use it for tagging all my photos with keywords and geotags found by the Google Image API and to align Picasa and Microsoft person tags. I can also transfer the tags of one photo to another if I have done some destructive editing of an image, e.g. imported and exported it to and from Mathematica.

Simple to install & simple to use, including from the command line. Extracts and displays a list of field values from descriptors of many types of media files. It has a zillion options but I needed to use almost none.