I have some photos which are not sorting properly in Shotwell. The developer said there are some issues, but I need to see ALL metadata (exposure date mainly but all ideally) to know if the bug is what’s causing my sorting issues.
Either by CLI or GUI, what’s the easiest way to view all metadata on jpgs?
thanks
I used once exiftool… On a quick dnf search I see there is a package called exif for viewing or removing exif tags.
dnf install -y exif
exif --list-tags --no-fixup image.jpg
Check the man page for more examples. You will probably have to do a loop and some bash magic to find or correct the problematic files.
Examples are here: ExifTool Command-Line Examples and here: GitHub - jonkeren/Exiftool-Commands: Several Exiftool commands I have used to edit/sort my pictures and improve metadata.
GUI (flatpak from flathub) here: Install jExifToolGUI on Linux | Flathub
Thanks, I won’t be trying any edits in CLI, just need to view at this point. I think I can edit the metadata in Shotwell, but Flo’s suggestions look better
Do I need to install the command line version before the GUI will work?
thanks
PS I notice all the wording uses the term ‘exif’. I always thought exif related to metadata on images, and only images. I am hoping it can view metadata of all files, as I would have more use for that later too.
There also is a Flatpak metadata cleaner, not sure if it also displays them.
Then some image viewers may display it. GNOME has loupe preinstalled afaik, but there is “Eye of gnome”, “Imageroll”, “Gwenview” by KDE, and others. XNViewMP also exists but its proprietary and unmaintained, really powerful though and has full metadata view.
Metadata is always different.
To see EVERYTHING you may need a CLI tool
And you might want to add some tags to the post 
haha. what are these tag things you keep harassing me with? 
Metadata Cleaner - Yep, I have it! I use that before sending images or posting online etc.
Gwenview - I have that for basic edits. Wish I could find something better but it just about does what I need, albeit in a very ugly and illogical way (opening ‘Annotate’ window to annotate, when the app is an image editor to begin with, forcing me to maximise two windows and close one before saving… aagh!)
XNView - I installed yesterday and uninstalled about 2 minutes later! as a photo viewer it was horrible (compared to Shotwell at least which I already have). May be worth getting again if only for the metadata views.
Yeah I wanht to see everything so i guess CLI (or the GUI that comes with it) is needed. I am happy to use CLI if it is best way to see it all, as when I want to know what metadata a file has, I really want to see EVERY piece of data anyone else can find. I got sick of this on Mac, all these ‘metadata viewing’ tools, none of which ever seem to show ALL data, so I don’t get the point if you still can’t see some of it!!
Tags are added below the post title, and help clarify certain things like the fedora variant you are on, the fedora version, the components you want
XnviewMP afaik is the only tool that can give you the complete exiftool dump. Its settings are a bit strange, it is written in Qt and should totally be opensourced but the dev is completely inactive, so no chance I guess? I wrote him on the forum a year ago or so.
But…
There are a ton of apps
i see lots of apps but want just something to view, not clear, and for all file types not just exif/images. I think ExifTool will do the trick, just not sure if I need the CLI version before I install the GUI or not
The flatpak comes with everything the applications needs. The command line tool was just a suggestion as it seems.
Small follow up question as I have always wondered this…
I used ExifTool and whilst I will probably actually find CLI easier, it works as expected and listed a lot of metadata on an image. (It calls everything EXIF, but not all metadata is ‘EXIF’, so I was mainly trying to find all metadata on any file (including non images), but this will do for now as it’s an image this time).
I used Metadata Cleaner, it showed a lot of metadata, the full amount shown in ExifTool I think. Then I ran it on the file and it ‘cleaned’ it.
Afterwards I ran ExifTool on the file again, and 90% of the lines of data has gone, but some remains. See pic below, this is after cleaning. Is it the case that a file will ALWAYS have SOME metadata? So I will never be able to remove all? Presumably some is needed for the OS to see it and store it etc? Or should it completely clear down to nothing?!
Thanks
Added exif, gnome, workstation
