Added ExifTool integration to support 300+ file formats with improved
performance and unified API for metadata operations.
Changes:
- Added PyExifTool>=0.5.6 to requirements.txt
- Created comprehensive ExifTool setup guide (docs/EXIFTOOL_SETUP.md)
- Created ExifToolExtractor for reading metadata from images/video/PDF
- Created ExifToolUpdater for writing metadata to images/video/PDF
- Updated README with ExifTool installation instructions
ExifTool Benefits:
- Unified API for images, videos, PDFs (vs 5+ separate libraries)
- Support for 300+ formats (HEIC, RAW, MKV, and more)
- 10-60x faster batch operations with stay_open mode
- Better PDF metadata writing (current pypdf is read-only)
- Battle-tested tool with 20+ years of development
Architecture:
- Hybrid approach: ExifTool for images/video/PDF, Python libs for Office
- Graceful fallback if ExifTool not installed
- Automatic detection on startup with helpful messages
- Tag mapping from ExifTool tags to standard fields (title/subject/keywords)
Implementation follows existing extractor/updater patterns for consistency.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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