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I'm trying to export the EXIF metadata from my photo archives so that I can do some analysis of which focal lengths I use the most. Aperture has a "File --> Export --> Metadata..." option, but that seems to only include IPTC metadata and not EXIF info.

Is there any way to export the EXIF metadata to a text file?

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I don't know that you can. My prelim searches turn up 3rd party tools to accomplish this for you. – Alan Oct 13 '10 at 2:28
besides the answer below (kudos, Adam, for finding your own answer ;), another possible potion might be to just export some very small jpeg files, and then use other tools to go from there. This all just gets me thinking more of various features for the tool I want, though... photo.stackexchange.com/questions/5329/… :) – lindes Dec 26 '10 at 5:57
Aperture>File>Export>Metadata... seems to export all the info I need! (Aperture 3.2.2) – user7974 Jan 6 '12 at 23:58

1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

It turns out that Automator has an Aperture "Extract Metadata" action that has access to all of the EXIF fields.

I was able to solve my problem using a simple Automator workflow that performs the following steps:

  1. (Aperture) Get selected items
  2. (Aperture) Extract Metadata -- With the option for "Tabbed Text" output.
  3. (Text) New Text Document

I have uploaded the Automator workflow as Extract Focal Length.workflow for reference. This workflow took about 30-minutes to run on 10,000 images, but at least I got the data I needed out.

One note, be sure to collapse the steps so that the results aren't displayed in Automator if you are running this on many items as this will slow it down dramatically.

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