Extracting EXIF data into JSON

exif-to-json.md

command line tools for working with images to json

Extract all exif data as list into a json file:

exiftool -j -q dir > data.json

Sort the exif data by the original creation time:

jq 'sort_by(.DateTimeOriginal)' data.json

Extract exif data and sort by original creation time:

exiftool -j -q *.jpg | jq 'sort_by(.DateTimeOriginal)' > data.json

is there a way i can just get the object and not in a list ?

I’m not entirely sure what you want to achieve, but this should be a solution (let me know if this is not the case or you have another case in mind):

If you want to have the exif data of just a single file, call exiftool only on that file and extract the first (and therefore only) element of the array using jq:

exiftool -j -q your-image.jpg | jq '.[0]'
# alternatively write it to a file
exiftool -j -q your-image.jpg | jq '.[0]' > data.json

Thanks let me see if this is what I'm looking for

This seems to leave out a lot of information compared to using -all:all, even if you combine that with -j. For example with -j I only get a single TagName key, but with -all:all it shows 20 different tags.