Python - Earliest date of JPG file creation

Question

I want to create a function that is going to search for metadata of JPG files using exifread, select the earliest date from Image DateTime tag and print it. Here is the code I have so far (not much :D):

def GetExifTagsForFile(filename):
  file = open(filename,'rb')
  tags = exifread.process_file(file)

Usually, I would further create a list where I add all dates and then using min select the earliest date. However, here I am trying to operate with IfdTag for which this kind of solution will not work. The encoding of IfdTag is %Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S. I have also tried to change tag's format to datetime using strdtime, however, this solution works only for strings. Do you have any suggestions how to solve my problem?

Without knowing the structure of `IfdTag`, it's hard to say. — SiHa, May 19 '17 at 11:55

Nyps · Answer 1 · 2017-05-22T08:38:45.577

1

As pointed out by @SiHa this depends on how your tag is encoded. I think it should be "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS". In this case bring your tags first to string and then to datetime format, where you can use min():

from datetime import datetime

datetime_objects = [datetime.strptime(str(t['IfdTag'].values), '%Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S') for t in tag_list]
min(datetime_objects)

edited May 22 '17 at 08:38

answered May 19 '17 at 12:32

Nyps

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Thank you for your answer! Unfortunately, it seems that `strptime` does not work with `IfdTag`. – Kirill May 19 '17 at 14:51
I included a conversion to string-format. This has worked for me at least. – Nyps May 22 '17 at 08:33

Python - Earliest date of JPG file creation

1 Answers1