How to extract all metadata from photos in subdirectories?

Question

I have many thousands of images within a folder and its subfolders. Each subfolder contains other subfolders. In Windows, I'm using the command line and the exiftool to extract a few pieces of metadata from these images, and export them into a CSV file for later use.

From the command line, I set my directory to the highest-level at which these folders exist, and ran this code:

exiftool -csv -CreateDate -Keywords *.jpg > data.csv

It works, creating a file with metadata from the images in the top-level directory - but it only extracts data for files in the top-level directory. I can't find any mention after many attempts at searching of how to specify that I want to extract data from the images in all of the subdirectories as well. I imagine this is a straightforward fix, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. Thanks in advance for helping out a novice.

Answer 1

Try adding the -r option to the command, which tells exiftool to scan the directories recursively, starting from the top folder specified as an absolute path. Use the -ext option to specify the extension of files to operate on.

Example:

exiftool -csv -CreateDate -Keywords -r -ext jpg /absolute/path/to/top/folder > data.csv

Answer 2

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4764932/in-python-how-do-i-read-the-exif-data-for-an-image

If you are familiar with Programming (as I am) this would help. Just another way. :D