How to Get TIFF MetaData with Python

In previous articles on this website, you learned how to extract EXIF data from JPG image files. This week, you will learn how to get similar data from the TIFF image format.

The TIFF format also has its metadata. Pillow provides a similar dictionary for TIFF images in its TiffTags module. If you need a TIFF image, you can use this one, which is a cover from one of the author’s other books on ReportLab:

You can create your own TIFF metadata extractor utility by making a new file named tiff_metadata.py and adding this code to it:

# tiff_metadata.py

from PIL import Image
from PIL.TiffTags import TAGS


def get_metadata(image_file_path):
    image = Image.open(image_file_path)
    metadata = {}
    for tag in image.tag.items():
        metadata[TAGS.get(tag[0])] = tag[1]
    return metadata


if __name__ == "__main__":
    metadata = get_metadata("reportlab_cover.tiff")
    print(metadata)

Here you import the TAGS dictionary from the PIL.TiffTags submodule. Then in get_metadata(), you access the tag elements in the image by iterating over the contents of tag.items(). To make that information more readable, you use the TAGS dictionary that you imported.

Here is a sample of the output you will get when you run this code:

{'ImageWidth': (400,),
 'ImageLength': (562,),
 'BitsPerSample': (8, 8, 8),
 'Compression': (1,),
 'PhotometricInterpretation': (2,),
 'FillOrder': (1,),
 'StripOffsets': (82, 130882, 261682, 392482, 523282, 654082),
 'Orientation': (1,),
 'SampleFormat': (1, 1, 1),
 'SamplesPerPixel': (3,),
 'RowsPerStrip': (109,),
 'StripByteCounts': (130800, 130800, 130800, 130800, 130800, 20400),
 'XResolution': ((300, 1),),
 'YResolution': ((300, 1),),
 'PlanarConfiguration': (1,),
 'ResolutionUnit': (2,),
 'ExifIFD': (8,),
 'Software': ('Pixelmator 3.9',),
 'DateTime': ('2020:10:27 12:10:37',),
}

You can see that the value entries above are all tuples. This is because of how the data is returned from the tag data. If you would like a challenge, you can attempt to clean up this data a bit in your version of the metadata extraction utility.

Wrapping Up

You can use Pillow and Python to do all kinds of other image processing, so this is just scratching the surface. Download Pillow today and start learning!

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The post How to Get TIFF MetaData with Python appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.