Pulling EXIF Data from ALL Photos on Device without opening or selecting them

Question

So I'm looking to take EXIF data from all photos on a device without manually opening or selecting the photo from Gallery. So far I've found a ton of ways to pull it from a single photo (with hardcoded file path).

My question is, how do I access each photo without opening or selecting it, then gather EXIF data? My assumption was that I would have to access the phone's native photo directory through Environment.DIRECTORY_PHOTOS, then find some way to loop through all photos on that directory and gather the information I need. However, I haven't found a way to accomplish this.

Is this possible? Or is there a better way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

If you have the correct directory of the folder, you should be able to iterate through the list of photos to get the exif data. It'd be slow, but effective.

Basically, iterate through them. For example, in python(I did this for a project):

from PIL import Image
from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS
from PIL.ExifTags import GPSTAGS 

def get_field (exif,field):
    for (k,v) in exif.items():
         if TAGS.get(k) == field:
            return v
try:
   for filename in glob.glob("*.jpg"):
      image=Image.open(filename)

       for (k,v) in Image.open(image)._getexif().items(): 
            print ('%s = %s' % (TAGS.get(k), v))
            img = Image.open(image)
            exif = img._getexif()
            fs="%Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S" #date format
            datetime = get_field(exif,'DateTime')#Date Time

Something like this might do it. You could do something similar in android, just make sure to use an image library that you can iterate through quickly.